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VALIANT 
WOMAN 



A CONTRIBUTION TO 

HE EDUCATION A; f'ROBI EM 




Class *_ 

Book 

Gpigtofl?_ 

COPYRIGHT 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Journal of a Recluse 

12mo, cloth. By mail, $1.37. 

"Has not a page that tires the cultured reader." 

— Brooklyn Eagle. 

"Well worth reading and re-reading for its 
diction alone." — Minneapolis Tribune. 
"A most remarkable book. * * * There is 
scarcely a page that has not some sentence that 
makes one pause to think." — Journal of Education. 

Kirstie 

12mo, cloth. By mail, $1.37. 

A love story, in which the writer displays the 
same power and skill as in "The Journal of a 
Recluse." The scene is laid principally in 
Quebec and Italy, and the plot concerns the 
affairs of an attractive young American woman. 

A Valiant Woman 

12mo, cloth. By mail, $1.10. 

Under the guise of a tribute to an honored 
teacher's memory, the author here presents a 
lively, thorough, and up-to-date discussion of 
vexed educational problems now attracting world- 
wide interest. 



THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY 



A VALIANT WOMAN 

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE 
EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM 



BY 



Mi F. 



AUTHOR OF THE JOURNAL OF A RECLUSE 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



*i 



Copyright, 1912, 
By THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY. 



Published October. 1912. 



©CI.A328069 



To the Teachers of America, in loving 

AND GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF THE VALIANT 
WOMAN WHO WAS ONE OF THE BEST OF THEM 



INTRODUCTION 

4fT -s HERE are, on the face of the earth, imagina- 
tions without number which pass through 
life in like manner as the deaf and dumb, and are, for 
all that, none the less beautiful. They are like the 
flowers which we see in the distant south. There was 
a great probability that no eye should ever see them. 
I am sure that, likewise, there are hidden lives which 
are charming." So wrote Ximenes Doudan, the 
charm of whose own life has rescued it from obscur- 
ity; and the following pages are written in a loving 
and reverent desire to lift into the light another of 
those beautiful, obscure lives which persist in the 
memory of those who have known them as a source 
of pure delight and high aspiration. 

I am not at liberty to give the name of the valiant 
woman whose memory persists with me, nor to give 
any biographical details which might lead to her rec- 
ognition. I can only give the pure spirit of her — 
distill, as it were, the perfume from the flower whose 
name and form and color are to remain unknown. 
But it is the perfume that gave persistent value to 
the flower, and having that, we need concern ourselves 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

but little with the soil in which it grew, or the culture 
it received at foreign hands. 

It is true, as Balzac says, that " the multitude gen- 
erally prefers the abnormal force which bursts its 
bounds to the balanced force which persists, having 
neither the time nor the patience to verify the im- 
mense power concealed under a uniform appear- 
ance " ; but it is not the multitude for whom this book 
is written. It is written for those to whom life puts 
serious questions; for whom seeming and being are 
not necessarily the same, and whose keen insight can 
make them feel how a life which in its bare simplic- 
ity would seem to most men and women absolutely 
bereft of charm, because wanting the consolations of 
vanity, may stand, nevertheless, for the solution of 
life's greatest problem, — How shall I make life 
worth living by preserving in myself the freshness of 
the heart, and increasing its power of unselfish love? 

But the book is especially written for those to 
whom the care of children and the young has been 
confided — to mothers and teachers. It is they who 
will find in it a spring of living water in the thoughts 
and feelings of one who was a mother in the highest 
sense, a mother of souls, and a teacher all her life, 
because the gift to teach was her birthright which 
she never bartered for any mess of pottage. Unfor- 
tunately I have been obliged to illustrate her life- 



INTRODUCTION ix 

work by a detailed account of our educational sys- 
tem, because it was so constant a subject of her 
thought; and I fear that I have submerged her in 
this account, instead of making it subordinate to her, 
as I most sincerely- would have preferred to do. For 
this reason I have given the book the sub-title, A 
Contribution to the Educational Problem. 

The word " contribution " shows that I have no 
intention of implying that the problems have been 
solved. It simply means that the book contains a 
frank and sincere discussion of the many questions 
that vex us in the schoolroom, and that they have 
been as profusely illustrated by valuable quotations 
from original sources as the scope of the book would 
allow; for I believe with Jean Paul that not a single 
good observation or rule on the subject should be lost, 
because it happens to lie imprisoned in a huge vol- 
ume or flutters about in a pamphlet of one leaf. I 
have approached these questions, not through the ave- 
nues of psychology, pedagogy, and philosophy, but 
through the well-trodden paths of experience and ob- 
servation, so that the book can be read without a dic- 
tionary of technical terms. It can be understood 
without torturing new meanings into old, well-known 
words, and it is not afraid to criticise where to praise 
would be cowardice. It does not seek applause, nor 
does it fear condemnation. It wishes simply to find 



x INTRODUCTION 

its own, to cheer the solitary thinker in the hours 
when he feels most solitary, by the image of one who 
peopled solitude with kindness and thought; and it 
would speak the language of sincerity to the ears 
that can recognize it. 

I have wished to say of the exquisite woman whose 
lifelong friendship it was my privilege to enjoy: 
You must know my friend as I knew her. You 
must hear her talk, you must feel the wholesome in- 
fluence of her presence and enrich your life with a 
rare and lasting friendship ; for such women as she 
do not wholly die. They leave traces of themselves 
wherever they have been, — a subtle perfume of char- 
acter that sweetens the air like the odor of violets. 

Yet she was the last woman in the world to think 
that there was anything extraordinary in herself, or 
to feel that her individual utterances of her opinions 
were worth preserving; and the only infidelity to her 
of which I have been guilty is that of preserving her 
letters when she wished them destroyed. But she 
had a firm belief in her convictions on many subjects 
relating to the education of the young, and would 
have been glad to see them generally accepted. And 
since she expressed these convictions in a simple, 
forcible language entirely her own, I have felt it no 
injustice to her memory to transcribe them as she 
wrote them, taking it upon myself to develop the 



INTRODUCTION xi 

ideas in the direction which she indicated. Con- 
scious that these extracts from her letters are to a 
great extent impersonal, and that where they are not, 
they can only reflect credit upon her, and enhance 
the value of her teaching by showing that she lived 
what she taught, I have forgiven myself for the infi- 
delity, knowing well that she would have been gener- 
ous enough to forgive me, too. 

The world has nothing to lose and everything to 
gain by the preservation to its memory of its noblest 
characters, whether they live and die in a blaze of 
glory, or live and die in quiet obscurity illuminating 
no other circle than the limited one in which they 
daily moved. And it seems to me that of the two, 
the lives of our mute, inglorious great are a more val- 
uable stimulus than those of the illustrious, because 
it is not given to us all to follow the flight of the 
winged souls, but we may all walk side by side with 
the strong and faithful, who, on the broad and dusty 
highway, have found life sweet and helped to make 
it so. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Teacher 1 

II. The English Question 35 

III. Instruction in Foreign Languages, 

Ancient and Modern .... 76 

IV. Instruction in Science and History . 117 

V. Ethical Teaching 158 

VI. Methods and Method Makers . . 209 

VII. The Valiant Woman 276 



A VALIANT WOMAN 



CHAPTER I 

THE TEACHER 

1%/TARCUS AURELIUS thanked the gods that he 
had not frequented public schools, but had had 
good teachers at home, and that when he had a mind 
to look into philosophy, he met neither with a pedant 
nor a knave to instruct him, and did not spend too 
much time in voluminous reading, chopping logic, or 
natural philosophy. 

I, too, in my humble station, can thank the gods 
that though I went to the public schools, I had at 
the most impressionable age of childhood my instruc- 
tion from a woman of rare superiority, whose friend- 
ship, continuing through my youth and maturity, 
has been the chief ornament and delight of my life. 
The greatest thing that can happen to any human 
soul is to have felt the presence of excellence, to have 
seen incorporated the highest virtues and to have 
loved them passionately. It is to be made rich for 
all time with an imperishable wealth. It is to be pre- 
served from loneliness in the most perfect solitude. 

i 



2 A VALIANT WOMAN 

It is to have touched reality and to be preserved 
from the doubt that belittles and scorns humanity. 
It is to remain fixed in moral values when the winds 
of diverse doctrines blow all the tattered faiths of 
mankind into shreds. It is to keep alive an exquisite 
hope in the future of the human race, climbing along 
its rugged path of progress with so many stumbles, 
yet showing us here and there a vigorous soul that 
can walk upright and unaided. It is to have known 
one of the choristers of that choir invisible who have 
made undying music in the world, and to carry in the 
memory some of that music's sweetest strains. 

I remember but indistinctly any teacher that I 
ever had before or after I became the pupil of this 
valiant woman, but I have only to shut my eyes, and 
the little room in which she taught rises as distinctly 
before me as if I had seen it yesterday. Yonder 
are the numerous rows of narrow wooden desks 
scarred and marked by many a careless knife and 
thoughtless pencil ; the chalk-covered blackboards ; 
the grimy paper and the smoke-darkened ceiling; the 
small, raised platform in front designed for the teach- 
er's desk and chair; the huge rusty cannon-stove in 
the middle of the room; at the back, the long, low, 
narrow wooden bench on which the daily recitations 
took place, and, turning all the dinginess and bare- 
ness of the room into cheerful brightness, the 



THE TEACHER 3 

teacher who presided over it, — the perfect teacher, 
the center of light and love, the soul that lived in 
realities and not in the shams of things. 

Of medium height, with an admirable figure which 
fashion had never deformed, holding herself erect 
without stiffness, looking you frankly in the face 
with bright gray eyes whose keenness never excluded 
kindness, she seemed to radiate an atmosphere of 
good will and high purpose. Her dark brown hair 
was brushed smoothly back from her temples and 
coiled in a loose knot at the back of her head. Her 
dress of dark cotton in summer, in winter of plain 
gray or black wool, was made with extreme simplic- 
ity, always in the same manner, and its only orna- 
ment was a cameo brooch at the throat. To have 
wished in any way to attract attention by her dress 
or ornament was as much beneath her noble dignity 
as it would have been openly to demand it. 

I have called her the perfect teacher; by that, 
I mean that she was first of all a strong personality, 
a woman who had placed no interpreter between her- 
self and life, but had drawn from it directly her con- 
clusions and opinions. And I mean great flexibility, 
— the power to yield one's self without losing one's 
self; the power to confront new situations without 
surprise or embarrassment. I mean that intuitive 
human sympathy which understands without ask- 



4 A VALIANT WOMAN 

ing questions; that keen sense of humor which is 
not shocked at the crude and the absurd, but with 
smiling recognition can help laugh it into the fin- 
ished and the fitting. I mean the gift of those 
" whose only joy in having is to impart/ 5 not in an 
ostentatious way to display one's own mental riches, 
but in the only serviceable way which sometimes lies 
very close to drudgery, — the teaching of the young. 
But it is the joy in it which is the chief thing, the 
joy in another's growth. This gift includes immense 
patience with honest dullness, — not vicious, idle dull- 
ness, but the dullness that struggles and works and 
to which hope is not denied. I mean, too, polished 
manners, — that indescribable something which gives 
charm to human intercourse, which veils homeliness 
of feature and meanness of stature, and makes it pos- 
sible to say and do even disagreeable and painful 
things in that acceptable manner that made some one 
say of Chesterfield, " He kicked me downstairs with 
such exquisite grace that I thought he was helping 
me up." 

And last of all, I mean health of body and health 
of mind, — the exquisite poise of equal humor, the 
cheerful outlook on life, the strength that is not con- 
sumed in the schoolroom, but leaves a broad margin 
for individual growth. 

The union of these gifts in one person is so rare 



THE TEACHER 5 

that it may almost be called genius; yet they were 
united in a remarkable degree in this valiant woman 
whom no one could ever forget who had once known 
her. There was in her a certain youthfulness of 
a perennial type, a wonderful clean-heartedness, a 
power of deep feeling accompanied by the most tran- 
quil expression of it, and a great natural bias towards 
truth and beauty. 

She came to us in the full strength of early ma- 
turity. We were ordinary children in an ordinary 
little river town of the Middle West. We had no 
public library, no museum, no traditions of culture. 
Our intellectual horizon was bounded by the town lim- 
its, and having never had an opportunity to compare 
these limits with anything outside, we thought them 
extremely wide, and that nothing of much importance 
could lie beyond them. To be sure, we had our vil- 
lage castes. Wherever the poor and the well-to-do 
are gathered together, invisible but well-recognized 
barriers are set up, separating those who have from 
those who have not. The banker's son does not meet 
his washwoman's daughter at the village ball, and 
even Santa Claus has a remarkable sense of these 
distinctions in his distribution of gifts at the Sunday- 
school Christmas-tree, and to those who have is liber- 
ally given> and to those who have not fall an orange 
and a small net stocking full of cheap candy. If 



6 A VALIANT WOMAN 

childish envy or childish heartbreak results, all un- 
conscious that family gifts are placed on the tree, 
who knows anything about it? Children think many 
things of which they are ashamed to speak, and who 
thinks it of any importance whether the ideal of life 
awakened by observation be, or be not, to break these 
social barriers and to get and to have in one's turn? 
This is where we were when she came, and she 
was to teach us that there is not only more of the 
world than that which we saw from our back yard, 
but that it stretched far over the other side of the 
garden and beyond the minister's neld 9 — a wonderful 
world with echoes that could reach us in music and 
pictures and stirring verse, and thoughts that rouse 
like a trumpet-note. And she was to teach us that 
getting and having are the poorest uses of life, un- 
less it be the getting and having of the invisible wealth 
of heart and brain. She came to say to us, " I 
know no classes, only individuals, and rank every- 
body by character," and to teach us that a lily may 
spring from a muck heap and a nettle grow in a pal- 
ace yard. She came to lift the lowly, and to hum- 
ble the haughty by showing us the incalculable value 
of an enlightened mind. She came to teach us what 
Montaigne calls the greatest thing in the world, 
namely, how to belong to one's self, — to have free- 
dom and strength and resourcefulness within us. 



THE TEACHER 7 

And how did she do it? That is an important 
question, — the most important we can ask just now, 
for to put it in an impersonal form, it runs: What 
must we do to educate the young in the very best 
way? 

Remember that she had absolutely no external ad- 
vantages in the way of laboratories, models, pictures, 
books, and all the varied and rich equipment of the 
modern schoolroom. She had the four bare walls, 
and the scarred benches crowded with some forty or 
fifty children, varying in age from eleven to twenty. 
She had one assistant ; and she was expected to teach 
reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography, 
history, the rudiments of the natural sciences, and 
Latin, if there was a demand for it. She had taken 
upon herself the care of a motherless niece, and the 
Latin class consisted of this niece and a tall lad who 
walked in from the country every morning to attend 
the village school, and to whom Latin seemed a 
brevet of distinction. But she had one immense thing 
in her favor. She was hampered neither by a set pro- 
gram, a cut-and-dried scholastic course which she 
must follow, nor by an officious supervision, ignorant 
of conditions, which dictated what and how she must 
teach. She was given absolute liberty. There were 
the children and a place to meet them, and given hours 



8 A VALIANT WOMAN 

for their meeting, and she was to answer their needs 
as best she could. 

She began as every live teacher does, by finding 
oat what these needs were. She was not content with 
the children's assertion that they had gone as far as 
page 150 with the preceding teacher and were quite 
prepared to go on with the subject. She wished to 
find out how much of the subject had gone on within 
them, had been assimilated and become a part of their 
mental equipment. Pushing her inquiry to tests, she 
discovered that the greater part if not all of it had 
either simply been eliminated undigested, — so much 
waste material thrown out of the system, — or it had 
persisted unused, a clog and hindrance that must be 
got rid of. 

I shall never forget the dismay of some of the 
older pupils working at advanced problems in arith- 
metic, who were turned back to the multiplication ta- 
ble. It was in vain that they protested that it had 
been so long since they studied the tables that they 
really shouldn't be expected to know them. Their 
teacher, to whom an ounce of accurate knowledge was 
worth a pound of uncertain information, told them 
that just as they could not learn to dance before 
learning to walk, so they could not accurately solve 
intricate problems without using in every step the 
elements of arithmetic, and must know them per- 



THE TEACHER 9 

fectlj. She showed them that multiplication is only 
a shorter form of addition, and division a shorter 
form of subtraction. She taught them how to make 
their tables, and drilled them faithfully till quickness 
and accuracy were assured; then proceeded to frac- 
tions, teaching by objects until the fundamental idea 
no longer needed the concrete form to support it 
clearly, and could be safely treated in the abstract, 
never advancing until the path was clear behind them. 
They covered less ground in a given time, but the 
ground was weeded out, plowed over, and sown with 
living seeds. It was not left waste ground encum- 
bered with stones in which nothing could grow. 

In the same thorough way she took up the sub- 
ject of grammar, rinding the children's memories 
clogged with half -under stood definitions. Her first 
task was to put full meaning into them by vivid illus- 
tration. She showed us that a transitive verb is 
one whose action affects or passes over some other 
thing, that we could sweep a floor, bake a loaf of 
bread, scour a kettle, but we could not is a floor, 
become a loaf of bread, or go a kettle, and that such 
verbs as these represent a condition or a form of ac- 
tion or being that ends with the subject. The rela- 
tion which a preposition shows between two words 
was illustrated by holding a book or pencil near, by, 
over, under, above, or on a table or chair. She 



io A VALIANT WOMAN 

set a child to describing a ball, or an apple, or 
a flower, and then said that all these words which 
say something about the form, color, taste, smell, 
or size of the object described, name some quality of 
it, and are called adjectives; and, therefore, that we 
cannot say properly that anything smells badly, any 
more than we can say it tastes sweetly; nor must we 
say that we " feel badly " for the same reason that 
we are not describing the action of feeling, but 
our own condition of health. She hunted down by 
unrelenting correction every ungrammatical or awk- 
ward expression we used, so that every recitation, no 
matter on what subject, was also a recitation in Eng- 
lish grammar; and by clearing our language of am- 
biguity and incorrectness, she helped us to understand 
other subjects. 

It is probably not an exaggeration to say that 
half the difficulties which pupils have in mathe- 
matics may be set down to their incorrect use of 
language or their incorrect interpretation of it. To 
feel clearly the force of every word we use is one 
of the highest ends of education; for nothing defi- 
nite or accurate can persist in the mind without 
this condition. It is a great temptation to omit this 
vigilance in correction, especially when listening to a 
mathematical explanation requiring close attention to 
logical deduction. To interrupt the child is to di- 



THE TEACHER n 

vert his train of thought ; but I believe that though 
the immediate result may often be disastrous, so far 
as the problem is concerned, the larger end most as- 
suredly justifies the correction. I have heard a child 
allowed to speak of the " two angles respectfully," 
and am sure that it is much more important that he 
should know the distinction between respectfully and 
respectively than that he should know the relation be- 
tween the two angles, because it is with words and not 
with angles that he will be most concerned all his life, 
and he ought never to be allowed to associate wrong 
ideas with any one of them. The use of the adjective 
real as an adverb has become so common for lack of 
correction, that even teachers constantly so misuse 
it, thus spreading the error; while, at the same time, 
in their efforts to be correct, they censure many a 
fine old English idiom like " have got" for example, 
evidently ignorant of the fact that every English au- 
thor whom they put as models into their pupils' 
hands makes use of it. 

The fact is that no one can have a fine sense of 
the value of words in any language, who is not well 
read in it; and in the multiplication of things to be 
learned and the multifarious distractions of modern 
social life, there are very few who have the leisure to 
read extensively. Our teacher was one of the few. 
Along with an unusual critical sense of excellence, 



12 A VALIANT WOMAN 

she had an active curiosity which led her into all de- 
partments of literature and science. 

" Of all the magazines," she wrote me once, " I 
like best the Popular Science Monthly. President 
Eliot of Harvard says that there are three pregnant 
results of the scientific study of nature: 

" ' First, it has engendered a peculiar kind of hu- 
man mind, — the searching, open, humble mind, that, 
knowing that it cannot attain to all truth, or even 
much new truth, is yet enthusiastically devoted to the 
pursuit of such little truth as is within its grasp, hav- 
ing no other aim than to learn, prizing above all 
things accuracy, thoroughness, and candor in re- 
search. 

" ' Within the last four hundred years, this typical 
scientific mind has gradually come to be the only 
kind of mind, except the poetic, which commands the 
respect of scholars, whatever their department in 
learning. The substitution in the esteem of reason- 
able men of the receptive, far-reaching mind for the 
dogmatic, overbearing, closed mind, which assumes 
that it already possesses all essential truth and is en- 
titled to the essential interpretation of it, is a most 
beneficent result of the study of natural history and 
physics. It is an achievement of the highest prom- 
ise for the future of our race. 

" ' The second result is the stupendous doctrine of 



THE TEACHER 13 

hereditary transmission. Finally, modern science has 
discovered the magnificent idea of the continuity of 
creation.' " 

This valiant woman herself possessed this search- 
ing, open, humble mind, fearlessly accepting what 
seemed to her truth, whether it flattered humanity or 
not, dreading nothing more than the fixed deadness 
of dogma. Her opinions were her own, having grown 
out of her experience, and she lived them with- 
out forcing them upon other people, though silently 
propagating them by the happy contagion of ex- 
ample. She had grown slowly, symmetrically; she 
had sloughed many old faiths painlessly, and there- 
fore felt no rancor against them or hatred for them. 
They fitted her no longer, but they had once belonged 
to her, — that was all. Why quarrel with those who 
still clung to them? Besides, it is dangerous to strip 
them off, before the shivering naked soul has some- 
thing better in which to clothe itself. 

At that time it was the custom to open school in 
the morning with Bible reading, prayer, and song. 
To her, this was an expression of human aspiration 
towards the infinite and the unknown, and I remember 
with what quiet reverence it was done. The portion 
to be read was selected from the Psalms, the Proverbs, 
or sometimes it was the Sermon on the Mount. It 
was never historical or condemnatorv, and no com- 



14 A VALIANT WOMAN 

ments were made, and no parade of piety appeared. 
She liked particularly to read the Twenty-third 
Psalm, which Henry Ward Beecher called " the night- 
ingale of the psalms, small, of homely feather, sing- 
ing shyly out of obscurity, but filling the air of the 
whole world with melodious joy "; and the prayer we 
daily heard was the prayer Christ taught, " Our Fa- 
ther which art in heaven." 

It was a quiet pause before the heat of the day's 
work. It was a reminder that there is something above 
us to reverence, something beyond the tangible to love 
and to hope for, and I think we were better for it. 
One of the great problems of modern education is how 
to supply this aspiration, this long, intent look up- 
ward, this consciousness of a power and excellence 
that is not ours, to which we owe submission and rev- 
erence. It is in vain to hope that culture will ever be 
widespread enough to do it. Culture has always 
been and will always be the privilege of the few, not 
because opportunities for culture are not general 
enough, but because the capacity for it is rare. The 
fact is summed up in the homely proverb, " You 
can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Be very 
sure that you can't. All you can hope to do is to 
rub the hair off and make a pigskin purse, and 
modern education does not even do that. It leaves 
all the hair on, bristling with importance and imper- 



THE TEACHER 15 

tinence. The Goethean recipe to hear a little song, 
see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a 
few reasonable words every day, is valuable and ef- 
fective only in him who has an inborn love of these 
things, and to whom they are therefore in some sort 
necessary. But to him who has not this love, but 
who has heard that there is a sort of distinction in 
culture and is resolved to have it by going through a 
set form of mental gymnastics, real culture will al- 
ways be wanting. 

This idea is admirably expressed by Hugo Miinster- 
berg in his book on the Americans. Speaking of the 
result of the frequent attendance of popular lectures 
in America, and the importance of the natural atti- 
tude of the mind to what is really excellent, he says : 
" It may be, indeed, that the village population under 
the influence of the last lecture course is talking about 
Cromwell and Elizabeth instead of about the last vih 
lage scandal, but if the way in which it talks has not 
been modified, one cannot say that a change of topic 
signifies any elevation of standard. And if, indeed, 
the village is still to gossip, it will seem to many more 
modest and more amiable if it gossips about some in- 
different neighbor, and not about Cromwell." 

Culture, then, is not knowledge, it is not familiarity 
with beautiful, rare, or costly things. It is the har- 
mony of the soul with what is excellent. It is being 



16 A VALIANT WOMAN 

at home with the beautiful. It is to be rich without 
.the possession of things. A pseudo-culture, the re- 
sult of indiscriminate cramming, is marked by two 
chief characteristics, — confusion of ideas, and con- 
fident ignorance. Now, pure ignorance, wholly un- 
tampered with, accompanied by humility, and the 
power of reverence, does not offend us ; on the con- 
trary, it often attracts and rests us, as children do ; 
but ignorance pretending to knowledge and boastful 
of it, is the most offensive thing in the world, and in 
attempting to give culture to everybody, our educa- 
tional system destroys ignorance in its beautiful, 
complete, white form, and substitutes this nauseous 
vanity for it. 

A child born and brought up in a part of the Ori- 
ent, where he had never seen snow or winter fogs, when 
for the first time he saw the misty vapor of a wintry 
morning all white and dim, asked, as his little face 
took on an expression of wondering awe, " Mamma, 
is it God? " 

This is what I mean by beautiful white ignorance, 
full of reverence and wonder in the presence of what 
it does not understand ; and this is an ignorance which, 
thanks to a system that aims at omniscience and hits 
superficiality, cannot anywhere be found in all the 
length and breadth of our broad, beautiful land. 
But we have abundance of the other sort, the igno- 



THE TEACHER 17 

ranee that thinks it knows all about a subject, because 
it has heard the name of it; and it is this ignorance 
which makes us ridiculous in the eyes of the world. 
As a nation we have a great deal of restless curiosity 
which passes for intelligence. We want to see the 
wheels go round in everything ; we are capable of dis- 
secting a mite to see how his cheese agrees with him ; 
but when it comes to reverence for what is above us, 
or to that exquisite delicacy which enables us to dis- 
tinguish what is really fine from what is coarse and 
showy, we are, in general, as absolutely wanting as 
the painted Indian of our prairies, and we merit the 
scathing rebuke which Ruskin gave us, in one of 
his admirable letters to the workmen of England. 

" You have felt," he says, " at least those of you 
who have been brought up in any habit of reverence, 
that every time when, in this letter, I have used an 
American expression, or aught like one, there came 
upon you a sense of sudden wrong, the darting 
through you of acute cold. I meant you to feel 
that. It is the new skill they have found there, this 
skill of degradation. Others they have which other 
nations had before them, from whom they have learned 
all they knew, and among whom they must travel 
to see any human work worth seeing. But this is 
their specialty, this their one gift to their race — 
to show men how not to worship, how never to be 



1 8 A VALIANT WOMAN 

ashamed in the presence of anything. But the magic 
of Zoroaster is the exact reverse of all this, to find 
the worth of all things and do them reverence." 

We need the rebuke, and we should not receive 
it with derision and self -boasting in the vulgar spirit 
that saj^s, " We, the younger generation, are ashamed 
to be ashamed." We should not put forward our 
furniture and electric lights as an excuse for the 
shabbiness of our souls and the rudeness of our man- 
ners. We should not confound impudence with 
frankness, nor glibness of tongue with thought. We 
must not think that culture is something that we 
can plaster on us as the savage does his paints, or 
that we can get it in chunks like coal by paying 
for it in buildings and laboratories, and we must not 
feel that lawlessness is freedom. " It is not in wish- 
ing to recognize nothing superior to ourselves that 
we are made free," says Goethe, " but, on the con- 
trary, by the reverence for something above us, be- 
cause in revering it, we lift ourselves up to it, and 
thus reveal that we ourselves have something higher 
in us and are worthy to be like it. In my travels, I 
have often been thrown with North German mer- 
chants who thought they were my equals when they 
seated themselves rudely at my table. By this very 
action they showed that they were not my equals ; 



THE TEACHER 19 

but they would have been, had they known how to 
treat me properly and value me." 

We, too, must be made free in the same way, not 
by boasting of superiority, but by feeling that it is 
a privilege to reverence; that it does not show servil- 
ity but the power of feeling excellence, the power 
of discriminating between the little and the great, 
and that not to have this power is an irreparable 
loss. 

It was a deep insight into this fundamental need 
of the human heart, which made Goethe insist so 
much upon the teaching of reverence in the model 
school in Wilhelm Meister. Wilhelm, observing now 
and then a boy who passed on to his work with- 
out saluting his overseer, inquired why this was per- 
mitted. " It is full of meaning," was the answer, 
" for it is the greatest punishment we inflict upon 
our pupils ; they are declared unworthy to show rev- 
erence, and obliged to exhibit themselves as rude and 
uncultivated natures." 

Have we reversed this method in modern teaching 
by setting so high a value upon independence and 
individuality that our manners as well as our ideas 
have fallen into anarchy? If we cannot hope to re- 
form them by a widespread culture, we can at least 
reform them to some extent by restoring respect 



20 A VALIANT WOMAN 

for age and authority, and teaching compassion and 
sympathy for what is beneath us. But age and 
authority must see to it that they are in themselves 
respectable. Old age ashamed of its gray hairs and 
apologetic for them, insisting that it is seventy years 
young, and dreading the word " old " like a winter 
wind, is not worthy of reverence, but of deep pity; 
and authority intoxicated with its power and using 
it basely is beneath contempt. 

Our valiant teacher was a woman of real culture, 
a natural leader. One felt it instinctively in the 
serenity of her behavior, in the quick decision that 
answered the need of the moment, in the power of 
self-possession, in the ability to command while seem- 
ing to request, in the comprehensiveness of her in- 
telligence and its broad fund of general information. 
She was no specialist. The teacher of that time, 
like the ward school-teacher of the present, was ex- 
pected to know everything, or at least a little of 
everything, and having walked in all directions in 
the field of knowledge, she had a broad horizon. We 
felt power in her, and we reverenced and loved her 
for it. 

Nothing escaped her vigilant eye. She felt it her 
duty to tell us when anything was amiss, and just 
as she corrected our lapses in grammar, she cor- 
rected our lapses in good behavior. She put a stop 



THE TEACHER 21 

to gum-chewing; she directed the yawner to conceal 
his gaping mouth with his hand ; she asked for whom 
we were mourning when she discovered a black streak 
under the finger nails ; she subdued the high, shriek- 
ing voices of the girls, and suppressed whistling in- 
doors among the boys ; she required us to stand 
and to sit erect, and to pass without unseemly hurry 
and unnecessary noise from room to room; she broke 
us of the ugly habit of replying with a grunt or a 
shake of the head for " yes " and " no " ; she taught 
us to say " Thank you " for a service rendered. In 
short, she made us feel the beauty of courtesy, and 
she taught us the moral beauty of perfect courage 
— not only in great things but in little ones : how to 
subdue physical discomforts, how to meet disagree- 
able duties and fatiguing tasks, how to tell the truth 
and hate a lie. If we had a long walk to school in 
the winter wind, she reminded us of the immense 
courage of La Salle, starting from Creve Coeur, 
opposite Peoria, Illinois, to walk to Canada through 
pathless forests and over pathless plains. She spoke 
of the beautiful cheerfulness of one who carried 
sunshine with him wherever he went, who never com- 
plained of the wet and cold when he came home, but 
spoke with gratitude of the cheery warmth into 
which he entered ; who never complained that he was 
tired, but expressed his joy in the prospect of rest, 



22 A VALIANT WOMAN 

thus teaching us that it is better to live in cheerful 
affirmatives than in dreary negatives. 

She extended her solicitous interests as far as per- 
sonal taste in dress. The tawdry, the gaudy, the 
superfluous were highly distasteful to her, and here 
again she taught us that simplicity is the first mark 
of culture. The barbarous custom of piercing the 
ears to hang rings in them was then in vogue, and 
when the girls came to school with swelled, pierced 
ears and silk threads hanging in them, she quietly 
asked them if they thought they were any prettier 
with those threads dangling from their ears. Then 
followed an earnest, inspiring talk on real beauty. 
She told us that the first intellectual need of the sav- 
age is to be moved through his eyes, hence his atten- 
tion to personal adornment. And because his tastes 
are coarse, he must tattoo himself, daub bright colors 
on his face and body, hang glittering bits of metal 
in his ears and sometimes in his nose, rob the birds 
of their brilliant feathers, the animals of their claws, 
teeth, and furs, and pride himself upon the variety 
of his collections. On the other hand, the first in- 
tellectual need of the civilized man is to be moved 
through ideas, to take up into himself as much of the 
varied, wonderful life of the outer world as he can, 
and enlarge his personal experience with the expe- 
rience of the race. She showed us that to him beauty 



THE TEACHER 23 

is something more subtle, more indefinable, than it 
is to the savage, and that, with regard to the human 
face, there lies in it the reflection of intelligence, the 
suggestion of power, or of sympathy and tenderness, 
and that no ornament can give this beauty. 

" Every face is beautiful to me," she said, " in 
which I see a tender, loving heart looking out of it, 
and no face otherwise is so." She held up her finery 
formed hand to show us that she never wore a ring, 
and she told us of More's Utopians who used gold and 
silver to make chains and fetters for their slaves, 
and how they wondered that any man can be so mad 
as to count himself the nobler for the smaller or 
finer thread of wool which he wears, since the wool, 
no matter how finely spun, was worn by a sheep ; 
and for all the sheep's wearing of it, yet could he 
be no other thing than a sheep ! And in tins way 
she taught us to wish not so much to possess, as to 
be in ourselves something valuable. Many years 
later she wrote to me: 

" One of the blessings of my life when I entered 
youth and mature years was the meeting of finely 
cultured men and women; but, of course, I met the 
uncultured also, and so I have always seen at once 
the difference between them, and this has been a 
great blessing to me, for it has kept me from ever 
feeling that finery or rich clothes would add to my 



24 A VALIANT WOMAN 

value. I saw that, as a rule, it was the unlettered 
who thought most of fine clothes. That is why, I 
suppose, I go to the extreme, and cannot bear to 
see a cultured man with an ornament about his per- 
son, or even a flower in his button-hole. And as for 
a showy handkerchief cropping over an outside 
pocket, isn't it disgusting? I don't even like to see 
a ring on his finger. 

. " Elizabeth Stuart Phelps sent Whittier What to 
Wear. He wrote her that it was the voice which 
he long wished to hear. He spoke of the shoddy 
extravagance that had reached everybody, the church 
and the world alike affected. ' It has entered cradle 
and nursery and turned the sweet simplicity and grace 
of childhood into a fashionable scarecrow. Think of 
these grotesque caricatures of womanhood at the bal- 
lot box ! . . . Scant of clothing where it is most 
needed, and loaded down where it is not.' 

" In a book written by one of Queen Victoria's 
household during the life of the queen, so she prob- 
ably read it, it was said that the queen Avished her 
ladies to dress well but plainly, having a dislike to 
smart frocks, flyaway hats, and disorderly hair. I, 
too, have the same dislike for these things, and in 
children, especially, I like to see simple dressing. 
As for teachers, the} 7 should spend their money on 
books, not clothes. No pupil should go home from 



THE TEACHER 25 

school and feel ashamed of her mother's simple 
dress because there was too great a contrast between 
it and her teacher's. Do you remember that at 

C , I wore to school a cape bonnet as most of 

the girl pupils did? And it did not hurt me as a 
teacher, for I had the power of sympathy. I re- 
member a little boy used to run to meet me and take 
my hand as I went to school. He was not consid- 
ered very bright. His teacher said to me, ' How 
can you have that boy take your hand in walking? ' 
I said, 6 1 love to have him do so,' and so I did. 
I could not understand her feeling. I suppose that 
natural sympathy made discipline easy for me as a 
teacher. I could never speak ill of a pupil." 

It was this natural sympathy, too, that gave her 
a remarkable degree of insight into the child-mind; 
and, by the way, there is no possible way of acquiring 
this insight without sympathy. No amount of what 
is called child-study, or psychology of the child- 
mind, or pedagogical training can be a substitute 
for this quick intuition, or unerring feeling. Every- 
thing else is but the gathering of bricks and stones. 
Sympathy is the master builder that puts them into 
place and makes an edifice of them in which children 
are really housed. It is one thing to count the num- 
ber of stamens and petals in a flower; it is quite 
another thing to feel its beauty as a whole and repro- 



26 A VALIANT WOMAN 

duce it on canvas or in verse. Too many psycholo- 
gists are but petal counters and classifiers by stamens 
and pistils; and that is why the most learned psy- 
chologists are apt to have the least knowledge of 
human nature. They forget that cataloguing intel- 
lectual activities by no means implies an unerring 
comprehension of their action as a whole, and young 
teachers ought especially to be warned against be- 
lieving that even the most thorough and systematic 
study of the child-mind from books can give them 
any valuable knowledge of the child's character which 
sympathetic association with children cannot give. 
But even then, association with children can give 
nothing if the memory of our own childhood has 
faded from the mind and there does not still live in 
us some inextinguishable spark of youthful fire that 
kindles in the presence of youth, and wraps them 
and us in its clear, warm flame. It is an unreason- 
ing, spontaneous emotion, refusing to be caught and 
fixed by rules, and therefore forever unteachable. 

I have already said, and repeat it here, that it 
was this exquisite intuition of a deep love for chil- 
dren which gave our valiant teacher her remarkable 
knowledge of the child-mind. She did not seek the 
fruit in the flower. She knew that it is impossible 
to speak intelligently to a child outside of its ex- 



THE TEACHER 27 

perience, and did not need to go to Herbart to learn 
the " laws of apperception.'' She knew that a child's 
world is a very narrow one, and that it is a picture 
world, instead of a thought world, and that it is 
to be broadened, at first, by supplying it with more 
pictures, and letting the thoughts take care of them- 
selves ; and where are better pictures to be found 
than in the masterpieces of the world's literature? 
I remember with gratitude that in pursuit of this 
end, she laid aside our worn McGwffey's Reader 
with its scrappy, kaleidoscopic contents, broken bits 
from many pictures, and set us down before a com- 
plete panorama in that fine old classic, The Pilgrim's 
Progress. 

She did not trouble us at all with the allegory. 
She knew that we were too young to understand its 
application to all the faults and vices of mankind, 
but we waded with her through the Slough of De- 
spond; we saw the fire flash from the impending 
mountain; we heard the lions roar by the waj^side; 
we fought with Apollyon in the Valley of Humilia- 
tion, tarried at Vanity Fair, groaned with Christian 
and Faithful in the Castle of Giant Despair, and 
finally climbed the Delectable Mountain and saw 
shining from afar the Celestial City. The book be- 
came a living reality to us, and that without draw- 
ing any didactic lessons from its reading. It was a 



28 A VALIANT WOMAN 

series of vivid pictures which only in later years ac- 
quired their complete didactic value. 

When I try to recall the trend of this remarkable 
woman's teaching, I find that it lay in the idea of 
a simple, strong foundation for self -development ; in 
other words, she meant to give us the wish to know 
and the power to gratify that wish by our own 
efforts. She never weakened us by injudicious aid. 
She stimulated us in every way to be our own teachers. 
She would have felt it a crime against us, to twist 
and mold us to some set pattern, cram us with a 
multitude of unrelated facts and thus exhaust our 
curiosity. Like the gardener who does not try to 
open the rosebud with his fingers, but lets the dew, 
the sun, and the rain do their work and give him the 
perfect flower, so she wisely refrained from hasten- 
ing the natural development of the mind, lest she 
should deform it. She labored only to make herself 
unnecessary, and the day on which she could say to 
a child : " You need me no longer ; your education, 
by virtue of your love of knowledge, is in your own 
hands now," — that day she felt that her task was 
done. 

The foundation for self -development, as she inter- 
preted it, lay chiefly in an observant love of nature 
and a deep love of literature. To awaken in the 
child a lasting love for this wonderful external world 



THE TEACHER 29 

of which he is a part and set him to observing it 
with loving curiosity, to arouse in him a deep affec- 
tion for his fellow-men as he sees them revealed in 
their thoughts and deeds in the finest literature, is 
to open to him the doors of a university in which he 
is master and pupil at the same time. 

Her manner of doing this was entirely in harmony 
with her knowledge of children. She did not bait 
and tease the child with too many questions ; she 
preferred that the questions should come from him. 
She never anticipated his experience, never required 
him to talk by hearsay; but wherever she could, she 
put experience in his way, led him through it, and 
then often refrained from talking of it, wishing him 
to preserve inviolate the freshness of his impression. 
I particularly remember this fact in relation to what 
was the most delightful and without doubt the most 
valuable part of her teaching; namely, reading aloud 
to us from fine books. She had a clear, penetrating 
voice and read in an entirely natural way, without 
any attempt at over-dramatization. I recall espe- 
cially, her reading of Barbara Frietchie, Skipper Ire- 
son's Ride, Snow-Bound, Hawthorne's Gentle Boy, 
Andersen's Ugly Duckling, Dickens's Christmas Sto- 
ries, and other poems and tales from reputable 
writers, along with tales from Greek and Roman 
mythology ; and I remember the stillness of the 



30 A VALIANT WOMAN 

shabby room with its marred desks (our fathers be- 
lieved more in teachers than in environment then), 
but in no case do I remember her interrupting her 
reading to explain a passage beyond our reach. The 
vivid impression, the poetical effect, were far more 
to her than the precise interpretation of a metaphor, 
and I have a singular pleasure in recalling a childish 
error in my construing of the lines from Whittier's 

Snow-Bound: 

" The low green tent 
Whose curtain never outward swings." 

As the sweet lines rang out, there flashed through 
my childish mind, as yet unfamiliar with thoughts of 
death, one of those vivid mental pictures which startle 
us sometimes by their distinctness. I saw the grassy 
slope of a hill, flower-dotted, and felt the soft breeze 
that rippled the long grass stalks and waved gently 
to and fro the canvas of a tent. Years afterwards, 
on reading the poem, I was astonished to find that 
the lines meant a low, green mound in a graveyard; 
but at the risk of being misunderstood by some who 
love truth no better than I, I most emphatically de- 
clare that to the child that I was, the error in the 
beauty and sweetness of the picture it evoked was 
far more valuable to me than the truth would have 
been, for the simple reason that it struck the imagina- 
tion and awakened it. Had my teacher stopped to 



THE TEACHER 31 

explain that the low green tent was a grave, I 
should have been deprived of a beautiful mental pic- 
ture, and not having been vitally enlightened, I 
should have forgotten all about it in an hour or 
two; for, fortunately, we remember long only that 
which excites in us great pleasure or great pain. 

In the same way as in literature, she tried to 
inspire us with a love of nature, not in a curious, 
analytic spirit, nor in the spirit of collective acquisi- 
tion. It was a love into which beauty and imagination 
had breathed the spirit of poetry. Her own love 
of nature was something very rare and very peculiar. 
I can describe it in no better way than by calling 
it a real nostalgia. Her love for the woods and the 
fields was a passion. She went to them as the tired 
traveler goes home, and found rest and strength 
there. From these exhilarating walks in the woods, 
which we were sometimes allowed to share, she brought 
us the wild flowers, described their haunts, and dwelt 
on their beauty with such unfeigned delight, that we, 
too, learned to love them and to seek them for our- 
selves. 

" It is wrong," she wrote to me once, " that chil- 
dren cannot all have some study of nature, love the 
simple wild flowers growing in woods and fields, get 
some knowledge of lower animal life, know the name 



$2 A VALIANT WOMAN 

of every tree that they see about them, trace out 
some, at least, of the constellations in the sky, and 
know the story of the gods and goddesses that were 
given a place there. Then they would grow up more 
simple, less self-conscious, and careless for showy 
clothes and foolish amusements." 

This wrong she did all in her power to right for 
us, and she taught us that education is not a pos- 
session of knowledge, but a transformation by means 
of it; that a man is not necessarily educated, because 
he can solve a difficult problem in mathematics, or 
knows his Latin grammar, or can answer any number 
of curious and difficult questions ; that he may know 
all sorts of things and yet not know the deepest mean- 
ings and highest uses of life, nor his right place in 
the world, and that the value of what we know is to 
be tested by these simple questions: Are you hap- 
pier or more useful for knowing this? Do you have 
truer views of man's relation to man by virtue of it? 
Are you broader-minded, more generous, kindlier, 
humbler, less mindful of the things that pass away 
and more mindful of those that endure? If you 
are, then you are truly educated, and the best edu- 
cated man is he who is fittest to live, who has the most 
sources of pure enjoyment, who knows that the only 
real wealth is the trained eye, the hearing ear, the 
loving heart, the thinking brain, and who has such 



THE TEACHER 33 

mastery over his powers that wherever he falls, he 
falls on his feet. 

She taught us, too, that in what nearest concerns 
a man, no one can really help him. All real help 
comes from within, not without. The world can make 
a man neither great nor little. It can create a 
favorable or unfavorable opinion of him, but it can- 
not put a thought into his head, or a noble impulse 
into his heart; and that just as the oak tree of the 
wood cannot say to the oak tree of the lawn, " Grow 
for me," so a man cannot say to any college or 
university or assemblage of men, " Give me an educa- 
tion: grow for me." The growth of the oak is the 
power of the individual tree. It comes from absorb- 
ing the sunshine and the rain, from striking its roots 
deeper into the ground ; and in the same way, a man's 
soul growth is in his own power, and comes from 
absorbing the life around him wherever he may be; 
and she gave us the beautiful encouraging thought 
that though our ambitions might point to Harvard 
or Yale, to Paris or London, what we could not 
learn in our little obscure river town we could not 
learn elsewhere; that the principles of mathematics 
do not vary with the locality in which they are taught ; 
that we could read history, poetry, and fiction as well 
at home as in the Bodleian Library ; that the same 
stars shine for us that shone for Kepler and New- 



34 A VALIANT WOMAN 

ton; the fishes in our river had the same form and 
habits as those which Agassiz studied, and the wild 
flowers that bloomed in Pond's Woods and Truitt's 
Grove obeyed the same laws of growth and develop- 
ment that governed those which Linnaeus collected 
in Sweden. It was a thought that put power into 
our hands, the power of self-help — the one inestima- 
ble gift of every great teacher to his pupils; for 
" Few," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, " have been 
taught to any purpose, who have not been their own 
teachers." 



CHAPTER II 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 



A MAN'S language is his real letter of intro- 
duction to us, for it is the measure of his 
intelligence and his culture. His dress may be fault- 
less, his manners perfect ; but if his speech is halting 
and ungrammatical, we know his limitations. It is 
true that rare elevation and breadth of thought may 
give dignity to a faulty expression, just as a fine 
physique may make us forget a ragged or slovenly 
dress; but unquestionably the thought, like the phy- 
sique, appears to better advantage when properly 
clothed ; and the power to express thought with clear- 
ness, correctness, and force is one of the most de- 
sirable fruits of education. That is why grammar, 
rhetoric, composition, and literature have so prom- 
inent a place in the school curriculum. It is sup- 
posed that an analytic study of language in 
connection with an analytic study of literature, by 
formulating the rules for correctness and elegance 
of speech will necessarily lead to such correctness 
and elegance in practice. Unfortunately, it does not 
do anything of the kind. Never, perhaps, in the 

35 



36 A VALIANT WOMAN 

history of education has so much time, labor, and 
money been expended on any branch of instruction 
as is now expended on the teaching of the mother 
tongue. In our country, it is the one subject which 
no pupil escapes in any year of his high school 
course ; and yet there was never so general a complaint 
of inefficiency as that which is now raised against this 
department. The generality of the complaint makes 
it worthy of attention. Let us hear what it is. The 
charge is that graduates leave the high school unable 
to spell correctly or to read fluently ; that they ex- 
press themselves wretchedly, and do not love litera- 
ture. If the charge is true, the English department 
of our instruction, with the best intention in the 
world, and let us add, with the most strenuous effort, 
has failed to do that for which it exists. This does 
not mean that the teachers are incompetent ; on the 
contrary, they are often the ablest men and women 
we have in our schools, and the hardest workers. 
If, therefore, neither the teacher nor the seriousness 
of the work can be reproached, would it not be rea- 
sonable to seek for the cause in the relation of the 
course to the pupils themselves? 

It is said that Catherine II of Russia, after listen- 
ing to Diderot's brilliant but impracticable theory 
of government, said to him: 

" Monsieur Diderot, I have heard with great pleas- 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 37 

ure the inspirations of your brilliant mind, but all 
your fine principles, which I understand very well, 
would make very fine books, and yet would work out 
very badly. In all your plans of reform, you forget 
the immense difference between your position and 
mine. You work on paper, which submits to every- 
thing you say. It is supple in every part, offering 
no obstacle either to your imagination or to your 
pen. But I, poor empress, work on the human skin, 
which is, quite otherwise, ticklish and irritable." 

Is it not posssible that we, too, in our plans of 
education, very often forget that while paper will 
take ink, the human mind may not be equally ab- 
sorbent? Speaking one's mother tongue well is a 
habit that has usually grown up from infancy under 
the condition of hearing it spoken correctly. In 
unfavorable surroundings, that is, among illiterate 
people, the habit of speaking incorrectly is acquired, 
and can only be broken by long and continuous read- 
ing of fine literature, committing to memory choice 
selections, submitting to constant correction, and 
making a strong effort to imitate correct forms of 
speech. It may be safely stated as a very moderate 
average, that half our pupils are unfavorably situ- 
ated through the large percentage of foreign parent- 
age, and that we have the gigantic task of overcoming 
a persistent habit of incorrect speech, and forming a 



38 A VALIANT WOMAN 

new habit which to the pupil seems artificial. Out of 
one hundred pupils in one of our western high schools, 
over sixty were accustomed to using " snuck " as the 
past tense and past participle of " sneak," and when 
told to use " sneaked," demurred on the plea that it 
sounded " funny " and they would be laughed at if 
they said it. 

When we attempt to break up these habits by gram- 
mar and rules, we are not to be surprised at re- 
sults like the following genuine quotation : " You 
shouldn't say ain't, because there ain't no such word 
as ain't." The habit is simply immensely stronger 
than the rule, and it continues to be stronger, be- 
cause the rule is not a living part of the boy's daily 
speech, as is his vocabulary. In short, the study of 
grammar does not result in giving him an acute sense 
of his own imperfections, nor any proper mastery of 
language. From the rules of a language he has not 
yet learned to speak accurately, he passes to the study 
of rhetoric, that is to say, to the study of the rules 
of taste and literary criticism, the rules of elegance 
and finish in composition, before he has any adequate 
knowledge of the literature of his language from 
which these rules are drawn. In homely speech, we 
call this putting the cart before the horse. Un- 
doubtedly the analytic study of grammar and rhetoric 
should follow and not precede a study of literature. 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 39 

As it is, we reverse in English the pedagogical dog- 
mas we defend elsewhere and commence a study of 
the abstract before any adequate notion of the con- 
crete has entered the mind. It is like attempting to 
judge of bread before you have tasted it or even seen 
it ; and it is not at all surprising that very vague and 
incorrect notions, if any at all, remain in the mind 
of the majority of pupils after a course of grammar 
and rhetoric. 

The systematic study of literature follows in the 
curriculum the study of rhetoric ; and here, again, the 
analytic method prevails, and every effort is made, 
exactly contrary to intention, to destroy the pupil's 
interest in his book, by requiring a minute attention 
to every detail of it, a minute analysis of every sen- 
tence, until its character as a whole is dissipated in 
a confused jumble of definitions, criticisms, para- 
phrases, quotations, notes, and collateral informa- 
tion. This sort of work goes by the promising name 
of " intensive," and it is simply a crime against the 
intellect of youth, for it deliberately kills the imag- 
ination, and with it the joy in imaginative literature. 
And then having killed the imagination, we weep at 
its funeral, and complain bitterly that the minds of 
our young people are wholly practical, entirely in- 
sensible to poetry, indifferent to everything but fact ! 

Let every book lover ask himself how he learned 



40 A VALIANT WOMAN 

to love books, and he will tell you that he did it by 
reading books for his pleasure, and never by dis- 
secting them for his information or curiosity. Ask 
him how he learned to speak and write his language 
correctly, and he will answer, by hearing it spoken 
correctly and by reading good books — not by the 
study of grammar and rhetoric. When Macaulay 
was in India and was consulted upon the education of 
the Hindoos in the English language, he wrote: 

" I must frankly own that I do not like the list 
of books. Grammars of rhetoric and grammars of 
logic are amongst the most useless furniture of a 
shelf. Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That is worth 
all the grammars of rhetoric and logic in the world. 
We ought to procure such books as are likely to give 
to children a taste for the literature of the West, not 
books filled with idle distinctions and definitions which 
every man who has learned them makes haste to for- 
get. Who ever reasoned the better for knowing the 
difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme? 
Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance 
because he could define an oxymoron or an aposi- 
opesis? I am not joking, but writing quite seriously 
when I say that I would much rather order a hun- 
dred copies of Jack the Giant-Killer than a hun- 
dred copies of any grammar or rhetoric or logic that 
was ever written." 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 41 

I have mentioned it as the great debt I owe the 
valiant woman who was the teacher of my childhood 
that she led me to books in this natural way, open- 
ing up their wonders to me and allowing them to 
speak for themselves without her constant interfer- 
ence. She did not put the great masterpieces into 
our hands as text-books, and parse us through 
Shakespeare and Milton, pelted with notes at every 
page, interrupting the flow of fancy at every line with 
the fatal question, " What does that mean ? " or the 
foolish command, " Put that into your own words," 
thus requiring us to spoil a fine construction by a 
clumsy paraphrase. She introduced us to literature 
as she would have introduced us to music by playing 
exquisite melodies, instead of stopping the flow of the 
music to call our attention to the keys of the piano, 
the position of her hands, and further details of the 
technique of music, or to give us brief snatches of 
other melodies to contrast them with that which she 
had set out to pla}^. No, she played through the 
air without let or hindrance, and we listened in 
delighted silence. There is no other way to enjoy 
music ; there is no other way to love literature, — the 
music of the great souls of mankind. All thinkers 
know this, and many of them have said so. Dr. John- 
son in his preface to Shakespeare says : 

"Notes are often necessary, but they are neces- 



42 A VALIANT WOMAN 

sary evils. Let him that is jet unacquainted with the 
poems of Shakespeare and who desires to feel the 
highest pleasure that the drama can give read every 
play from the first to the last with the utter negli- 
gence of all his commentators. When his fancy is 
once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or ex- 
planation. When his attention is strongly engaged, 
let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theo- 
bald and of Pope. Let him read on through bright- 
ness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption ; 
let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue 
and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures 
of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and 
read the commentators." 

We do exactly the contrary : we begin with the com- 
mentators, and kill all interest and pleasure, striv- 
ing for an exactness we never reach and miss the real 
object of reading. 

Francesco de Sanctis, the foremost literary critic 
of Italy, and at one time professor of literature in 
the University of Naples, in the same spirit as John- 
son would have his students of Dante throw away 
all their commentators and stick to the text, paying 
no attention whatever to any other sense than the 
literal one, saying: 

" What you do not understand is not worth under- 
standing : only that is beautiful which is clear. Cling 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 43 

to your first impressions, which are best. Later you 
may explain them. Educate your taste. Question- 
ing comes after the aesthetic impression is canceled; 
the mind cools, and the critic, no longer able to per- 
ceive the situation in its integrity, loses his way in the 
details." 

He deplores the manner in which the schools de- 
liberately destroy in the young all sense of the beau- 
tiful and the true, by never permitting the pupil to 
abandon himself to his immediate impression, but, on 
the contrary, forcing him to analyze and dismember 
all that he sees and hears, thus reducing everything 
to definitions and moral principles — a deplorably 
artificial method that first kills nature and then 
anatomically dissects the corpse. 

Wherever a master hand is at the helm the ship 
steers out of this sickening, choppy, little sea into 
the wide waters. In Barrett Wendell's reminiscences 
of Lowell's teaching of Dante, he says: 

" To that time, my experience of academic teach- 
ing had led me to a belief that the only way to study 
a classic text in any language was to scrutinize every 
syllable with a care undisturbed by consideration of 
any more of the context than was grammatically re- 
lated to it. Any real reading I had done, I had to 
do without a teacher. Mr. Lowell never gave us less 
than a canto to read and often gave us two or three. 



44 A VALIANT WOMAN 

He never from the beginning bothered us with a par- 
ticle of linguistic irrelevance. Here before us was 
a great poem, a lasting expression of what human life 
had meant to a human being dead and gone these five 
centuries. Let us try as best we might to see what 
life had meant to this man, let us see what relation 
his experiences, great and small, bore to ours, and 
now and then let us pause for a moment to notice how 
wonderfully beautiful his expression of his experience 
was. Let us read as sympathetically as we could 
make ourselves read, the words of one who was as 
much a man as we, only vastly greater in his knowl- 
edge of wisdom and beauty ! That was the spirit of 
Mr. Lowell's teaching. It opened to some of us a 
new world. In a month, I could read Dante better 
than I ever learned to read Greek or Latin or Ger- 
man." 

Mr. Wendell adds that Lowell was careless about 
the mechanical details of his work — the correction 
of papers and so forth. " Once after an examina- 
tion, he said nothing about marks, and at last an anx- 
ious pupil asked what he had got. Lowell asked him 
what he thought his paper was worth. 6 About sixty 
per cent,' was the answer. ' You may take it,' said 
Lowell, ' and I shan't have the bother of reading your 
book.' " 

Those who mark with fractions and 100 -f- and 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 45 

1 00 — ought to read that over thoughtfully several 
times to feel the large indifference of a great mind 
to what seems so vastly important to the lesser one. 

The fact is that the power to feel excellence is 
rare, but the ability to give a definition needs noth- 
ing but a grammar or a dictionary. A false purism 
in the schoolroom deliberately mutilates our fine, sim- 
ple, idiomatic phrases by substituting for them a 
stilted pedantic speech born between the pages of a 
grammar and a dictionary and having no living real- 
ity in human intercourse. Fortunately, this purely 
artificial schoolroom English rarely becomes a fixed 
habit, but soon drops away from the pupil, leaving 
him his naturally slovenly speech which he might be 
able to outgrow if the love of the best literature had 
made a reader out of him; but a false method of 
studying classic literature results in an absolute in- 
difference, if not distaste, for all good books, or else 
in a pedantic interest in mere form or curious infor- 
mation that is entirely opposed to a living, wholesome 
interest in literature. Then again, the books given 
to the pupils are often away beyond their mental 
horizon, and do them more harm than good. A dull 
lad in his senior year said to me recently, as he looked 
with disgust on an annotated copy of Midsummer- 
Night's Dream: "Why don't they give us some- 
thing practical to read? It makes me mad every 



46 A VALIANT WOMAN 

time I take one of them dramas home ! " and I thought 
as I listened to him that his teacher had set himself 
the task of cleaning an Augean stable with a garden 
hose, and hoped to transform it into a beautiful park 
with a handful of roses and violets. 

But this unfortunate condition of literary instruc- 
tion is by no means confined to our own country. It 
prevails more or less wherever literary instruction is' 
given, and I cannot forbear giving a sketch of a de- 
licious bit of irony on the subject to be found in 
a recent German book by Dr. Max Kemmerich, en- 
titled Dinge die man nicht sagt. The author criti- 
cises university instruction in his country in the 
form of an account of the experiences of an enthusi- 
astic young friend who goes to the university in the 
hope of drinking in learning as from an exhaustless 
well. At first, he is attracted to history, hoping to 
get a complete and connected picture of the develop- 
ment of human civilization, but instead of this he 
finds studies in endless and wearisome detail of frag- 
ments of history, and despairs of ever obtaining a 
broad view of the whole. Then he turns his attention 
to Oriental poetry. The subject fascinates his im- 
agination, and he hopes to catch something of its 
spirit to insure himself a permanent source of intel- 
lectual pleasure. But here again he repeats the ex- 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 47 

perience of his first attempt in history. His pro- 
fessor spends half a year lecturing on the various 
editions and commentaries of the Arabian Nights, 
before getting to his subject. By this time the fasci- 
nation the student felt for Oriental poetry is changed 
to disgust, and he drops it for the study of German 
poetry. The course begins with a study of Walther 
von der Vogelweide. 

" The person of the poet is the central point of 
observation, and naturally, it is not at first what he 
felt, nor what he suffered and struggled for, that en- 
gages our attention, but when and where he was 
born. That was an inexhaustible theme, as there are 
a considerable number of people by the name of Vogel- 
weide, the birthplace of any one of whom might be 
that of our great poet." 

After a long discussion of this question, occupying 
months, the professor solves the mighty question, and 
introduces his students to the poet's works. 

" He chose the charming little song, 

* Bei der Heide 

Da unser beide Bette was, 

Da konnt ihr finden, 

Wie wir beide 
Die Blumen brachen, und das Gras. 

Vor dem Wald in einem Thai, 

Tantaradei ! 
Sang so suss die Nachtigall.' 



48 A VALIANT WOMAN 

" After an explanation of the grammatical word- 
form, etymology, etc., which consumed weeks, the ex- 
planation of the poem began. The discussion com- 
menced, first, concerning the significance of the 
linden tree in the religion and customs of our fore- 
fathers ; its geographical range, the form of its 
trunk and leaves, the conditions of its growth, and 
other highly important questions necessary to the 
comprehension of the poem. 

" How subtle the poet's choice of the linden ! No 
other tree could have harmonized with the design 
which Walther had in his mind, firstly, because there 
is a question of heath in the next stanza, and the 
linden stands in solitude, and not in dense forests. 
Secondly, because it gives a denser shade than other 
trees, and because its leaves are heart-shaped, and 
therefore a symbol of love; so that the poet through 
his choice of the tree already darkly hints at what 
is to follow; and lastly, because the linden is prime- 
vally German and sets the national heart to throbbing 
faster. 

" As for the heath, it has its own peculiar flora 
and fauna. There are immense heaths in Germany. 
The best known is the Liineberger heath; and yet 
is not probable that Walther was thinking pre- 
cisely of this heath. However, it is not impossible. 
Professor Hinterbauer has indeed brought forward 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 49 

some very weighty reasons for believing it, but as 
genuine savants, it is better to declare a non liquet." 

Then followed a series of questions of fundamental 
significance which occupied a half year in discussion, 
and no solution of them was given at the end of it. 
True learning has such unfathomable depths ! " The 
professor's further digressions concerning the reason 
why Walther did not lay the action of the poem in 
the forest, but (cf. b. 7) before the forest in a val- 
ley, we pass over, in order to turn to the explanation 
of the third line. 

" ' Da unset beide Bette was ' is not to be literally 
understood, of course; because the transportation 
of a double bed into this somewhat remote region 
must certainly have been accompanied by difficulties. 
A single bed would have been decidedly easier to han- 
dle, but it would not have answered the purpose. The 
poet with his well-known thoroughness would not 
have omitted mentioning the fact that he had had a 
bed on the heath. Instead of that, he not only omits 
the declaration, but from what follows, it clearly ap- 
pears that the bed in this case has a purely meta- 
phorical significance. It stands for a place on which 
to recline, as a couch must designate a preparation 
for rest. For although, indeed, a mattress may be 
constructed of flowers and grass, a proper bed may 
not. At any rate, we shall seize this opportunity to 



50 A VALIANT WOMAN 

get a clear idea concerning the furnishings of a Ro- 
man house. 

" We must not imagine that the furniture is so rich 
and costly as it is at present. In fact, the luxury 
of that age did not call into existence single objects 
of rare material and artistic value: on the contrary, 
domestic life, in comparison with our present ideas, 
was very primitive. To be sure, in the writers and 
poets of the middle ages, precious coverlets are fre- 
quently mentioned, and various names are given for 
such textures. For example, there is P feller (pfcl- 
let), old French paile, derived from pallium, samit, 
Tr-ibldt, cicldt, Baldekin, Zenddl, Pofuz. (The bell 
rings.) 'Gentlemen, we shall continue in our next 
lesson the consideration of Roman textures and their 
terminology.' " 

At first, the young student is not very much inter- 
ested in this sort of thing, does not see any necessary 
connection between their wide excursions into history, 
etymology, antiquities, and the poem which he is 
studying ; but under the daily pressure of custom and 
example, he finally becomes enthusiastic, and begins 
to feel that the only positive knowledge is philology; 
eventually becomes a philologist himself and has pu- 
pils of his own, whom he instructs exactly as he was 
taught. He has given up all original thinking and 
original work in order to write commentaries on the 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 51 

works of other men who have been dust for centuries ; 
and the author concludes his sarcasm by this remark : 

" This perpetual rooting around in nullities, this 
puzzling one's brains over things that are utterly in- 
different to everybody else, this raising of questions, 
not to advance learning, but in order to be able to 
publish a dissertation or a thesis, — all this which is 
so typical of the German savant has the fatal conse- 
quence of narrowing the horizon, dwarfing sound hu- 
man reason, and encouraging intellectual arrogance." 

Whatever we may think of the exaggeration of this 
picture, we cannot help admitting that it comes too 
near the truth to be dismissed with a laugh, and many 
an honest teacher's notebook will confirm the fact 
that encouraged by his profusely annotated text, he 
has strayed far away from his poem in a veritable 
wild-goose chase of research and finished with a 
scrap-bag of miscellaneous information instead of a 
definite conception of the poem as a whole. 

It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the 
object of the study of literature is not information, 
but inspiration, and that to make a classic the pre- 
text for accumulating a vast number of facts in 
philosophy, geography, astronomy, history, natural 
science, philology, and antiquarian lumber, is to mis- 
use it strangely, and hopelessly to destroy the pur- 
pose for which it was written. If it is a real classic, 



52 A VALIANT WOMAN 

it is an immortal bit of human life, and as such it 
speaks a language that all may understand; and 
though the young must necessarily lose what tran- 
scends their experience, they ought not to miss a cer- 
tain breadth of outlook or that exhilarating atmos- 
phere and intellectual stimulus which makes its charac- 
teristic value ; and they would not, were their attention 
not distracted by endless impertinent digressions. 
What does it profit them to scan a verse and learn 
the etymology of its words, if they lose the tonic 
quality of its thought, — the quality that sets us on 
our feet again when we have been stumbling and are 
discouraged, that clears the blurred vision and makes 
us once more masters of ourselves? That is the glo- 
rious mission of genius, and youth should know how 
to listen to its message. 

But criticism is easy: counsel and direction are 
far more difficult and incalculably more helpful. 
What ought not to be done is sufficiently clear. Now, 
what ought to be done? 

I have spoken of the manner in which the remark- 
able teacher of my childhood interested her pupils in 
the reading of good books. Nothing could be simpler 
and nothing more effective. She made them the 
source of the deepest pleasures we had in school. She 
was one of those who believe that the earliest years 
of a child's life require the most careful teaching, 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 53 

and that naturally this training is the mother's espe- 
cial privilege, and the wasted hours of childhood were 
the lifelong burden of her thought. 

" I feel deeply the present results in the education 
of the young," she writes, " but I am not sure that 
the schools are to blame in the matter. The chil- 
dren have not the right start from the very first in 
the home. The memory should be strengthened by 
learning fine poems, and long ones. The young 
should get a good vocabulary, beautiful thoughts, 
and a command of language from masterpieces in lit- 
erature read to them. Instead of that, there is no 
home reading, or that of a very poor kind, and enough 
of such to weaken the mind; then, in school, follows 
the cramming of facts. I have sometimes been in 
the lower grades of the public schools, and I have 
pitied the poor children. I felt that if I were obliged 
to remain there a week, I should turn into one of 
the wooden benches. I suppose you know how little 
real mental culture the girls have who are given cer- 
tificates to teach and begin their work with dear chil- 
dren. 

" Beginning a teacher's life, I should not choose to 
be placed in a high school, where so many subjects 
must be taught superficially. President Hill said 
once that when connected with school boards he 
tried to have the best teachers put in the lowest 



54 A VALIANT WOMAN 

grades. George B. Emerson of Boston said that if 
he had three grades of schools and three teachers, he 
would put the best educated and most intellectual in 
the lowest grade and so on. What children learn 
young, they will long remember. I would not have 
a child learn a poem and then forget it, but obliged 
to have it ready to recite. I wrote a young boy to 
form the habit of reading a good poem every night 
before he went to bed. I agree with President Jor- 
dan on the inexpressible value of having children 
learn by heart fine poems. A child is wronged who 
does not know more than a hundred such by the age 
of fifteen. Professor David Swing once wrote me: 
6 You are right to have your pupils study good poems. 
I am more and more thankful that I once possessed 
the zeal to learn poems by heart. They are with me 
at all hours, and when friends are absent they be- 
come friends and pour into my ears their kind whis- 
pers.' 

" Lucy Larcom said that when she was in the 
Lowell factory at twelve years of age, the poetry 
which she held in her memory breathed its enchanted 
atmosphere through her and around her, and even 
lighted up dull drudgery with its sunshine. Miss 
Sullivan said of Helen Keller, ' I am teaching Helen 
rhymes and verses. I think they quicken all the 
child's faculties, because they stimulate the imagina- 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 55 

tion. Of course, I do not try to explain everything. 
Too much explanation directs the child's attention 
to words, so that he fails to get the thought as a 
whole.' 

" Nothing, I think, takes the place of the early 
start in the supreme books. School studies of them- 
selves gives no desire for knowledge. I have known 
high school and normal school graduates who had 
taken botany in their school course and yet never 
knew the names of the trees which they passed every 
day in the school yard, and what is more astonishing, 
they were quite indifferent about knowing them. So 
I see more and more that facts are poured into pupils' 
minds, but that they give no desire for knowing any- 
thing further. But reading of the best books from 
early days does so, by awakening thought, giving 
mental activity, and so results in intellectual culture. 
I have long thought that in a child's education there 
should not be much in a literary way before nine 
years of age, except being read to from classical lit- 
erature, learning fine poems by heart, and learning 
to spell all the words in the same. I would not have 
a child begin reading books for himself too early, 
not, in fact, until his literary taste is really formed; 
otherwise poor books will often be read. Oh, the 
early reading is so valuable, and time is a sifter of 
books, and that is why the young should read only 



56 A VALIANT WOMAN 

the old, old books, — the classics. Of course they 
do not understand all that they hear, but what of 
that? Arnold of Rugby says truly of the young, 
i It is a great mistake to think that they should un- 
derstand all that they learn, for God has ordered that 
in youth the memory should act vigorously, independ- 
ent of the understanding, whereas a man cannot usu- 
ally remember anything unless he understands it.' 
How well it speaks of Arnold that as a rule his boys 
entered the higher schools with more character of the 
best kind than pupils of other schools. 

" By the way, did you read what the Rhodes 
scholar, after a term's residence at Oxford, said of 
the difference between the scholastic equipment of the 
Oxonian and his American colleague ? It is extremely 
pertinent to the subject. Here it is: 

" ' The Englishman is superior in general culture, 
is better read, and has more concentration than the 
American. A smattering of nearly every form of 
knowledge has been thumped into us, and like 
most smattering has oozed out through our cranial 
pores. Swamped by a great number of subjects in 
his precollegiate days, especially such as juvenile 
forms of astronomy and geology, the American boy 
is apt to become temporarily interested in one or 
the other of these studies and so devote his odd mo- 
ments to out-of-school reading on his momentary 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 57 

hobby, rather than to reading Scott, Dickens, or 
Thackeray. This is all very well, if he has a decided 
taste for one or two of these subjects which may 
develop with advancing years. Such is often the 
case, to be sure ; but far oftener he loses his puerile 
interest in successive ephemeral favorites, forgets all 
but the last, and finally discovers his life work without 
having the knowledge of literature that attends so 
naturally a more confined field of study in which the 
literature of the ancients is the most prominent fea- 
ture. 

" £ To come to our closely allied frailties in the 
classics. . . . The smattering education we have re- 
ceived in our home schools is the origin. We have not 
really begun our classical work soon enough to be 
on a par with the Oxonian. The Englishman does 
not get a smattering of countless subjects through- 
out his precollegiate days. What he gets first, he 
keeps getting repeated doses of, and at the completion 
of his university course in Litterae Humaniores, he is 
saturated with literature, philosophy, history, and 
economics, ancient and modern. Within these 
bounds, he thoroughly dwarfs us classical Rhodians. 
Moreover, whether because we are an unrepresenta- 
tive body of American collegiates, or because the 
human mind refuses to retain smatterings, we are 
often led to doubt the scholastic value of fleeting 



58 A VALIANT WOMAN 

glimpses of vast subjects of which the Englishman 
never learns in school.' " 

I have purposely introduced these citations as a 
hint of the direction which efficient English teaching 
might take. It is an unfortunate fact, however, that 
the teachers of our public schools will never be able 
to count upon the active cooperation of mothers, for 
the simple reason that the vast majority of mothers 
of the working class have neither the time nor the 
necessary taste, inclination, and culture to give their 
children the proper start in mental activity; and the 
great majority of mothers of the leisure class will 
not take the time from their so-called social duties 
to do it, granting that they did possess the necessary 
qualifications, which, after all, is a mere assumption. 
The public school, therefore, in the great majority 
of cases, must do this for the children ; and from their 
very first entrance into school, an hour or two each 
day should be set apart for them, in which the teacher 
should read to them, in no lifeless, perfunctory 
way, but with animation and interest. As to what the 
teacher should read, although general directions might 
be given if necessary, no absolutely prescribed course 
should be laid out. The teacher will read with far 
more effectiveness if allowed to exercise individual 
taste in the matter, taking care, however, that this 



* THE ENGLISH QUESTION 59 

taste does not exclude the possibility of interesting 
the children. 

Any one who takes the pains to collect the 
advice of great thinkers as to what the young should 
read will be very much perplexed and amused by the 
conflicting opinions in the choice of books; yet all 
are agreed on one thing, arid that is, that they should 
read the best books. Horace Mann thought little of 
history for children's reading and especially con- 
demned the Old Testament as too horrible ! While 
Dr. Arnold of Rugby particularly recommends his- 
tory, and Ruskin attributes his power of application 
and skillful use of the English language to the habit 
of learning long chapters in the Bible and frequent 
reading of it forced upon him by his mother. Goethe 
speaks for the ancients, Macaulay for the modern 
writers. Emerson pleads for a little fiction as recre- 
ation. J)r. Arnold attributes the growing childish- 
ness in boys to the habit of reading exciting stories 
like Pickwick and Nichleby which satisfy their in- 
tellectual tastes without strengthening them, or 
arousing them to healthy activity. Dr. John Brown 
advises young medical students to shun modern and 
popular literature and go in for the older classic 
writers: Shakespeare, Dryden, Johnson, Moliere, 
Spenser, Lamb. Walter Scott favors history, of 



6o A VALIANT WOMAN 

course, and would not plan any regular course of 
reading for children, but let their taste guide them, 
provided the taste be not vicious. Dr. Johnson is of 
the same opinion, only he goes a little farther in not 
discouraging a boy from reading anything at first ; 
thinking it a great matter to get him to read at all. 
All, however, recommend poetry of any character. 
In short, each naturally favors the subject that has 
been most valuable to him. John Stuart Mill and 
Herbert Spencer prefer the scientists; Hazlitt is 
against them, and Lamb counts works of history, 
science, and philosophy among the books which are 
no books ; and in one of his letters to Coleridge grows 
indignantly eloquent over children's books in which 
the primary object is to be instructive and not de- 
lightful. " Think what you would have been now," 
he cries, " if instead of being fed with tales and old 
wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed 
with geography and natural history! Hang them! 
I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and 
blasts of all that is human in man and child ! " 

There is more than whimsicalness or individual 
taste in this little outburst. There really is in it 
a recognition of one of the deepest needs of the 
human intellect, — the need to escape from the op- 
pressiveness of realities. Fact is very necessary; it 
is a practical world, but we play in it as well as 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 61 

work in it. Imagination is the playground of the 
intellect. It is here we run, we leap, we climb, we 
set the blood in motion, and come back with heartier 
zest to our prosaic tasks. The preservation of this 
pure playground of the intellect is necessary to cul- 
ture. The imagination is, in fact, the very source 
of all right enjoyment of literature, and to destroy 
it is to put out the eyes of the mind. For this reason, 
in the early reading of the young, we should make 
room for the world's great fables, fairy stories, 
myths and poems saturated with imagination. The 
Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, The 
Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels, La Fontaine's 
Fables, The Fairy Tales of Andersen and Grimm, 
Hawthorne's Wonder Booh and Tanglewood Tales; 
the myths of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Norse- 
men will all find place there, and they should be read 
to children as they were written, and not in child- 
ish travesties of one-syllabled words, with all the 
thoughtfulness and quaint, vivid turns of expression 
wrung out of them, until they are poor, bare, color- 
less, ghastly skeletons of themselves. The language 
of a great writer is not the least valuable of his gifts 
to us, and it should never be sacrificed to give place to 
puerilities. Besides, how is a child's vocabulary to be 
increased if he is alwaj^s to hear the few simple words 
with which it begins? Memorizing of fine poems 



62 A VALIANT WOMAN 

might accompany this reading. Conversations on 
what had been read and narrations of it are excellent 
language lessons, and should be as spontaneous as 
possible, no previous preparation being required. 
The real drill should fall on written and oral spelling. 
A great deal of foolish criticism of long lists of dis- 
connected words given to spell, has almost driven the 
practice out of our schools ; but those of the older 
generations who were drilled in their spelling books, 
can, at least, spell without any difficulty, and have 
some very pleasant recollections of exciting spelling 
matches which not only relieved the task of its 
drudgery, but gave it a real zest. 

In the same way good oral drill in grammatical 
forms, constant correction of slovenly, muddled, and 
ungrammatical expressions, might take the place of 
a text-book until the pupil reaches the high school. 
Here the formal study of grammar might profitably 
begin, provided it attends strictly to its own business 
of being a careful study of the relation of words to 
each other, and is not one of those mongrel produc- 
tions of so-called " correlation " which tries to be 
literature, history, geography, science, and grammar 
all in one. Not long ago, while searching for a gram- 
mar to put into the hands of a young Russian, anxious 
to learn the principles of the English tongue, I found 
to my great astonishment that the books which our 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 63 

children were using for grammars were utterly use- 
less for the purpose; and I had to search through 
numbers of second-hand book stores for some old- 
time grammar, and was fortunate enough to run 
across a copy of Lindley Murray. It gave me great 
pleasure to see again the subject treated with bare 
simplicity, unshrinking straightforwardness, abso- 
lutely indifferent as to whether the learner will find 
the bare white skeleton dull and ugly or not. One 
idea only seemed to occupy the author, and that 
was to make his articulations clear. And, after all, 
is it not the business of grammar to teach the anat- 
omy of the language, to give names to its bones, to 
show how they fit into each other, and clothed with 
thought make the grace, beauty, and motion of lan- 
guage ? 

Acquaintance with the great masterpieces should 
continue, but now the pupil for the most part must 
do his own reading. In connection with every high 
school, there should be a small but very select library. 
It need not contain more than two or three thousand 
books including duplicates of the very best, and neces- 
sary dictionaries and books of reference. With very 
rare exceptions these books should not be used as texts 
nor provided with annotations. " A work of art," says 
Goethe, " is to be enjoyed, not analyzed." To daw- 
dle weeks and months over a book which could be read 



64 A VALIANT WOMAN 

in a few days, teased and tormented by questions 
and definitions and notes, until all real interest is 
destroyed and weariness and disgust take their place, 
is, I repeat, an educational crime. We wish to make 
these boys and girls wide readers ; we wish them 
to find the joy and consolation of friends in the 
world's best books, and they must do it as we did it, 
by being turned loose in a library and allowed to 
pick and choose a book with no set plan, no definite 
system. We read because we had an appetite for 
reading, because curiosity and interest grew by what 
it fed on. Would it not be a good plan to allow 
pupils the same liberty, giving them each day an 
hour, or better, two, in the library with the privilege 
of making their own selections, but requiring them 
to give a written or oral report of what had been 
read every fortnight? 

This report made in the class room on a variety 
of books would have the effect of stimulating curi- 
osity and would direct the reading into channels nat- 
urally interesting to the young. In this way, during 
a school year of forty weeks, at least twenty good 
books would have been thoroughly read, and, what 
is more, enjoyed by each pupil, where under the 
present method only four or five are read and that, 
for the most part, in a wholly unprofitable way. 

In the second year a systematic study of English 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 65 

literature might be entered upon, and the reading 
of the pupils with regard to class-room work might 
be directed towards an acquaintance with the works 
of the author under discussion. An introductory 
lecture by the teacher on the purpose and meaning 
of literature in general, its commencement in poetry, 
and the reason for it, the growth of the drama out 
of religious sentiment, the reading of Lowell's essays 
on Chaucer and Spenser, are all that is necessary 
before opening the course with the study of Shake- 
speare. 

Young people in general are not sufficiently im- 
personal in their tastes to be able to get anything of 
particular value from the study of Chaucer, and few 
teachers are able to read old English with anything 
that approaches accuracy. But then, is anybody 
quite sure how it was spoken? The time available 
for linguistic study is too short for any valuable 
achievement, so that it is altogether better to let our 
earliest poet continue to be the delight of poets, in- 
stead of turning him into a stumbling block for the 
young. With Shakespeare, however, the student sails 
at once out on the boundless waters, with a vast hori- 
zon and an open sky. The school editions of the 
best-known masterpieces may be profitably put into 
his hands, but the teacher should dwell as little as 
possible on the notes and as much as possible upon 



66 A VALIANT WOMAN 

the revelation of the immense breadth of mind dis- 
played in the dramas, in which all human nature, its 
littleness as well as its greatness, is so vividly and 
faithfully reflected. The pupil should be made to 
feel that the spirit of poetry does not lie in its form, 
but in its sentiment, that it is thought heated by 
feeling and expressing itself musically. Many 
striking passages, rich in thought or in beauty of 
sentiment, should be memorized ; but the work should 
never be allowed to drag. Better an entire ignorance 
of the really great geniuses, than such a knowledge 
of them as wearies and repels. 

From the study of Shakespeare, it might be just 
as well to go on with the study of the remaining great 
poets. Studying authors in groups according to the 
character of their work is just as legitimate as 
studying them in chronological order. 

The great essayists, Johnson, Addison, Steele, 
Swift, De Quincey, Lamb, Macaulay, Arnold, Emer- 
son, Thoreau, might follow the poets ; and last of all, 
the novelists might be taken up. Here let the pupil 
be made to feel clearly what it is that makes the real 
excellence of a novel which the world will not willingly 
let die. It is because it speaks to man through man ; 
not through his clothes or his environment, or the 
mere external adventures of his life, but through 
character, feeling, and thought. And let the greatest 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 67 

care be taken to preserve to youth its generous en- 
thusiasms and harmless illusions. They are its birth- 
right and belong to it as the down on the peach, the 
bloom on the plum, and the dust on a butterfly's 
wing; and it is entirely unnecessary to smutch the 
hero with dwelling on the sordid details of his life. 

I grant that there is much that is absurd in the 
artificially heroic attitude towards life of the older 
fiction, there was much strutting about on stilts, 
where we now walk much more comfortably on our 
natural feet; but of late we have been rushing to 
another extreme. We are infected with the horror 
of the commonplace, and because everybody can walk 
on his feet, we think it a distinction to saw off our 
legs and reel about on a miserable stump. And so 
a vast amount of merely clever writing has come into 
vogue of late which is very easy reading, very amus- 
ing reading, but somehow it has no staying quality. 
Once read, we feel no inclination ever to read it 

again. It leaves no exhilaration behind it stirs no 

deeper self in us than what lies at the surface. It 
is to the rich, full literature of the past, what the 
pert, noisy, egotistic stripling whom we call a smart 
Aleck is to the mature, thoughtful man, full of quips 
and sallies when the humor seizes him, but also capa- 
ble of large and serious thought that lifts us out of 
our lower selves. 



68 A VALIANT WOMAN 

This smart Alecky literature ever on the alert to 
utter brilliant paradoxes, preferring to stand on its 
head, walk on its hands, and kick its heels together, 
if it can only attract attention, has succeeded the wave 
of pessimistic and subjective writing which followed 
the great scientific discoveries of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. The pessimistic literature was the cry of 
despair that followed the loss of faith; and terrible 
as it often was, it had at least the ring of genuine 
feeling in it, and was infinitely more respectable than 
this mocking, imp-like bravado, proud if its heart- 
lessness, with its thumb at its nose and a twirl of 
its fingers at all the sweet and ennobling illusions of 
the human heart! It mocks at religion, it laughs at 
love, it spits at marriage, it grins with a fiendish de- 
light at the crash of a fallen idol — and would smash 
Michelangelo's Moses to put Billikins in its place, 
and hide the canvas of the Madonna of the Chair 
with a flaring poster of a Hawaiian girl in the hula- 
hula dance! 

But this sort of thing cannot last. We shall out- 
grow our spiritual growing pains, mental anaemia, and 
hysterical convulsions and return once more to the 
broad, serene, contemplative attitude towards life. 
The generous superabundance of the sap of life which 
bubbles up in the older writers will course through 
our veins again and relieve the tension of the over- 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 69 

wrought nerves that ask now for a galvanic battery 
to move them, instead of the rose of the garden and 
the lily of the field. We shall cease to fear the com- 
monplace, when we have imagination enough to trans- 
mute it. A fly darts into a sunbeam and is transfig- 
ured. It is no longer a dull, dark, colorless insect. 
It gleams like gold, — a radiant, moving point : so 
a dull fact gleams in the presence of a mind all light 
and warmth. It is the same fact, but it has color 
and movement now. It dazzles and fascinates. And 
we shall have our facts given to us again alive and 
shining in the golden light of genius, when we cease 
to wish the impossible, and feel again a healthy joy 
in life. 

This irradiating, transmuting power of genius is 
what the pupil must be made to recognize and feel, 
before his schoolroom course in literature is finished. 
Then, and not till then, is he able to begin the study 
of rhetoric with any degree of profit. He knows, 
now, some of the characteristics of a great book. 
He knows the spell of fitting and musical language, 
and he may learn to give a technical name to some 
of the forcible ways of expressing a thought. He 
has learned what some great men think on various 
subjects, and they have stimulated him to think for 
himself, and enabled him to write a readable essay. 
The folly of requiring young people to write before 



jo A VALIANT WOMAN 

they have anything to say, and to express an opinion 
before they have one or are able to have one, is 
committed repeatedly every day. We talk a great 
deal about our indebtedness to Pestalozzi, but I hear 
no one calling attention to what he says on this very 
point, namely: 

" In order to direct children to the path of reason 
and of independent thinking, we must take care as 
much as possible that they do not open their mouths 
and accustom themselves to utter an opinion about 
things which they know only superficially. The time 
for learning is not the time for judging. Judging 
belongs to the time of mature perception of the causes 
which underlie the subject to be judged. I believe 
that every judgment having inner truth, which an 
individual pronounces, ought to fall from a compre- 
hensive knowledge of causes as ripe and complete as 
the perfect, ripened grain freely and without con- 
straint falls from the husk." 

Do we heed Pestalozzi's advice? On the contrary, 
we pull open the tender green husk, take out the 
swelling grain full of milky juice, squeeze it between 
our fingers and destroy forever its power of growth ; 
for if we find a timid, growing soul that says with 
beautiful frankness, " I do not know," we force it out 
of its sheltering ignorance, and make it write an essay 
about something away beyond its experience and pre- 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 71 

tend to know what it does not know. We fly far 
above our pupils' heads, and force them to seem, at 
least, to take these aerial flights with us, instead of 
flying alone when we must fly, and saying: 

" Never mind. I don't expect you to understand 
that yet. I should be disappointed if you did. I 
only wished to show you that there is another way of 
getting over the space, and that yours is not the only 
one. Don't be too sure of anything yet. Remember 
that growth is change, and that if you knew every- 
thing now, there would be no advantage in growing 
older. Don't espouse an opinion before you can 
take care of it, and don't let your mind get hide- 
bound." 

And what are we to do when school boards put 
Emerson into the curriculum, and Ruskin's beautiful, 
chivalric thought clothed in its exquisite, poetical 
garb ? Well, there is one thing we are not to do ; we 
are not to allow the pupils to say that Emerson is 
" crazy," and Ruskin a " fool " ; and when we come 
to the essay on the Over Soul, it is better to pass it 
quietly by. Do we know so much about the Over 
Soul ourselves? And we are to teach respect for 
what is above us. How infinitely superior to the 
student's insolence in the presence of what he does 
not understand is that instinct of reverence which 
spoke through a rough-looking English workman who 



J2 A VALIANT WOMAN 

stopped Tennyson in Covent Garden one day, saying 
as he held out his hand : 

" You're Mr. Tennyson. Look here, sir. Here 
am I. I've been drunk for six days out of the week, 
but if you'll shake me by the hand, I'm damned if 
I ever get drunk again." 

If we can bring our boys and girls to anything 
like the uplifting admiration of this rough laborer, 
we shall not be teaching literature in vain. 

The task of essay writing is perhaps the most 
difficult, most tiresome, and most unwillingly per- 
formed of all the tasks assigned in English work, and 
is certainly the most wearing on the teacher. The 
object of essay work is to engender ideas and teach 
the proper forms of expressing them. We talk a 
great deal, in a vague sort of way, about teaching 
children to think, as if it could be done by some mys- 
terious inner elaboration without furnishing the ma- 
terials of thought; but it is impossible to give out 
anything before taking anything in. A meager vo- 
cabulary, and vagueness regarding the meaning of 
words, even in common use, are the first difficulties to 
be overcome; and if subjects for essays are assigned 
wholly within the child's experience, he is confined 
to his narrow, insipid vocabulary and his very narrow, 
insipid experience, and writes nothing worth reading. 
If a subject is assigned which requires him to consult 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 73 

books, he copies diligently turns of phrases in a me- 
chanical way that leaves no impression with him, 
because it has cost him no effort. Therefore, since 
we cannot reasonably expect originality of thought 
or valuable ideas from the young, we should think of 
supplying them with a vocabulary. The best method 
for laying the foundations of a rich and flexible 
language and furnishing material for thought is to 
begin by reading to the class a short selection of 
perfect English, embodying a distinct idea, usually 
ethical, and requiring a report of it to be written in 
the presence of the teacher. Franklin's anecdote of 
the handsome and deformed leg, Lord Chesterfield's 
letters, Addison's essays, La Fontaine's fables, may 
be mentioned as admirably suited to this work, and 
not the least valuable discipline of it comes from 
the power of attention enforced. 

The work may be varied by selecting a subject for 
general discussion, at the close of which the class 
may be required to write an essay upon it, or to re- 
port the main points throughout. The manner of 
conducting this general conversation is very impor- 
tant, and the teacher himself, before entering upon 
it, should know exactly what he intends to make prom- 
inent. If he does not know this, the discussion be- 
comes mere futile floundering. The power to 
concentrate the thought on one aim only, and drive 



74 A VALIANT WOMAN 

every question home on the straightest line to that 
aim, is a rare one. Most questioners are apt to take 
tortuous, even circuitous paths to it, and sometimes to 
miss it entirely. 

After the first draught of the essays has been made 
in class, they should be exchanged among the pupils 
next day, for mutual correction, remembering that 
" the teaching is to the teacher and comes back most 
to him." When the pupils have marked all the errors 
that they can find, the essays should be returned to 
the owners, who make a clean, corrected copy for the 
teacher. 

The teacher's task may be lightened considerably 
by simply writing on the blackboard the most glaring 
errors that he finds, together with a properly spelled 
list of the misspelled words he has noticed. By calling 
the attention of the whole class to the errors that have 
been overlooked, he increases the pupils' watchfulness, 
and impresses the correction more forcibly because 
it is made public. There is no necessity of returning 
the essay, or of taking the time to mark the papers. 
The strength and vigor that go to this work may be 
more profitably saved to the teacher to be expended 
in other ways. There is no more cruel waste of vital- 
ity in teaching than that of minute marking of 
papers to be returned; and no teacher is justified in 
dulling his mind and wasting the rich hours of his 



THE ENGLISH QUESTION 75 

leisure in poring intently over the crude productions 
of immaturity, when he might be more truly fitting 
himself for his work by drawing inspiration from the 
masters. 



CHAPTER III 

INSTRUCTION IN FOREIGN LANGUAGES, ANCIENT 
AND MODERN 

TN Hamerton's admirable book, The Intellectual 
Life, there is an excellent letter addressed To 
a Student of Modern Languages, which every mod- 
ern language teacher should read when he is discour- 
aged over the progress of his pupils, or disheartened 
by the acrid criticisms of modern language teaching 
which at present are heard on every side. In that 
chapter, Hamerton lays down the following five prin- 
ciples which he believes are unassailable and " based 
on much observation of a kind wholly unprejudiced 
and tested by a not inconsiderable experience " : 

" 1. Whenever a foreign language is perfectly ac- 
quired, there are peculiar family conditions. The 
person has either married a person of the other na- 
tion, or is of mixed blood. 

" 2. When a foreign language has been acquired 
(there are instances of this) in quite absolute perfec- 
tion, there is always some loss in the native tongue. 
Either the native tongue is not spoken correctly, or 
it is not spoken with perfect ease. 

76 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 77 

" 3. A man sometimes speaks two languages cor- 
rectly, his father's and his mother's, or his own and 
his wife's, but never three. 

" 4. Children can speak several languages exactly 
like natives, but in succession, never simultaneously. 
They forget the first in acquiring the second, and 
so on. 

" 5. A language cannot be learned by an adult 
without five years' residence in the country where it 
is spoken, and without habits of close observation, a 
residence of twenty years is insufficient." 

" This is not encouraging," he continues, " but it 
is the truth. Happily a knowledge which falls far 
short of mastery may be of much practical use in 
the common affairs of life, and may even afford some 
initiation into foreign literatures. I do not argue 
that because perfection is denied to us by the circum- 
stances of our lives, or the necessities of our organiza- 
tion, we are therefore to abandon the study of every 
language but the mother tongue. It may be of use 
to us to know several languages imperfectly, if only 
we confess the hopelessness of absolute attainment. 
That which is truly and deeply and seriously an in- 
jury to our intellectual life, is the foolishness of the 
too common vanity which first deludes itself with 
childish expectations and then tortures itself with 



78 A VALIANT WOMAN 

late regret for failure which might have been easily 
foreseen." 

This is a particularly pertinent reminder just now, 
when language teachers all over the world are either 
asking themselves in despair what they should or 
should not do, or are boasting the wonderful results 
to be expected from the so-called natural method. 

I do not think that it is a lack of courage to look 
the question squarely in the face so much as an in- 
extinguishable pedagogical optimism that leads us 
into so many errors with respect to the outcome of 
language teaching. A little child, unaided, untaught, 
learns to speak its mother tongue intelligibly by the 
time it is four years old, and it would seem reason- 
able to suppose that a youth with the advantage of 
a trained mind might as easily acquire a foreign lan- 
guage, so that he would be able to speak it with at 
least a tolerable degree of fluency and accuracy after 
four years' study in a high school. But the fact 
squarely contradicts the supposition. The youth 
does not acquire the necessary command of the 
spoken tongue, although he may have a very service- 
able knowledge of the written language and a valua- 
ble introduction to its literature. That is, he has 
the imperfect knowledge of which Hamerton speaks, 
and which is by no means to be despised, if the youth 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 79 

in question has an assimilative and curious mind ca- 
pable of continuing its acquisitions. 

But with our immoderate optimism we are not sat- 
isfied with that. " What ! You have studied Ger- 
man four years, and you can't carry on an intelligent 
conversation with a native without having recourse 
to your mother tongue? It is absurd! " 

No, it is not absurd ! It is the most natural thing 
in the world and that is why it happens so. Let us 
consider what the youth has done under the most 
favorable circumstances offered to him. We will not 
suppose, however, that he has enjoyed the advantage 
of German, French, or Spanish parentage and has 
heard at home from his infancy the language which 
he is to study at school. We will suppose that he 
has never heard it spoken until he begins the study 
of it, which is most frequently the case in the ma- 
jority of our high schools. We will give him a 
native teacher and the much and justly extolled 
natural method, for, as Hamerton says, " By far 
the shortest way to learn to read a language is to 
begin by speaking it. The colloquial tongue is the 
basis of the literary tongue." Therefore, he shall 
hear in the class room only the language he is to 
learn, and he shall hear it every school day in the 
week. He shall have, too, the longest recitation 
period available, which is ordinarily forty-five min- 



80 A VALIANT WOMAN 

utes long. This means that for forty-five minutes 
during five days in the week, he has heard a little 
German, French, or Spanish, as the case may be, and 
that, after each of these periods, he has passed di- 
rectly into an English recitation, and for the rest of 
the day has heard nothing but English. The natural 
result is that it will be weeks before the strange 
sounds have become sufficiently familiar to be re- 
tained properly in the memory, and months before 
they can be reproduced with anything like accuracy. 
If the youth is not provided with a book, it will re- 
quire a still longer time to retain even the meager vo- 
cabulary with which his instruction must necessarily 
begin. We have no better name for this method 
than the " natural method," forgetting that the really 
natural method is the banishment of every other 
language at all times, except the language to be 
learned. The infant whom nature instructs hears 
the new language everywhere, at home, in the street, 
in places of amusement and places of instruction. It 
comes to him in play and in earnest; it is the me- 
dium through which his wishes are made known and 
his needs are gratified. He cannot help learning it 
if he would; while, on the contrary, the youth in 
his recitation of forty-five minutes has it presented 
to him in a manner wholly foreign to any of his 
wishes or necessities, and if for a moment his atten- 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 81 

tion is distracted, the spoken word is lost and the re- 
lation of ideas is hopelessly muddled. 

Therefore, instead of wondering that he retains so 
little, we should rather wonder that he retains as 
much as he does, and we should not set up an impossi- 
ble standard of perfection, and condemn all language 
teaching because the results fall far below it. We 
should rather frankly lower the standard to the pos- 
sible, know just what we really can do, and then try 
to do it in the best possible way. To the English- 
speaking student, all foreign languages are compli- 
cated with grammatical inflections entirely wanting 
in his mother tongue, and his first clear ideas of gram- 
matical relations, even in his own tongue, come to 
him through the study of a foreign language. Ger- 
man is especially a highly inflected language, almost 
as difficult as Latin. " If I die," wrote Lowell from 
Germany, " I shall have engraved on my tombstone 
that I died of der, die, das, not because I caught 'em, 
but because I couldn't." Many a schoolboy has 
felt likewise, and nothing but a patient study and a 
patient drill in grammatical forms can clear up the 
puzzle, and give him mastery of them. 

On the contrary, the German student has not the 
same difficulty in studying English. He finds a lan- 
guage almost without inflections. Gender is based 
upon sex, adjectives do not agree with their nouns in 



82 A VALIANT WOMAN 

gender, number, or case. Nouns have no case inflec- 
tion except the possessive, which offers no difficulties. 
The verbs are extremely easy, and though spelling 
may offer distracting irregularities, he is not troubled 
with that in commencing by the so-called natural 
method. But the English youth is perplexed at 
once with der, die, das and the unaccountable gen- 
ders of inanimate things, and the best way to start 
him is to explain to him in his own tongue a few 
of the grammatical peculiarities of the language, be- 
fore beginning to talk to him in it. And here it is 
important to state that the study of foreign lan- 
guages may be viewed from two entirely different 
standpoints, and that provision for studying them 
in two ways might very properly be made. It is un- 
doubtedly true that the majority of high school pu- 
pils will not be likely to have sufficient practice in the 
spoken foreign language, after leaving school, to en- 
able them to retain what they have learned, and it 
will gradually fade from the memory ; for it seems 
to be a law of mental acquisition that we soon lose 
what we cease to make use of. In such cases, the 
chief value of language study would lie in a thorough 
mastery of grammatical principles and a sufficiently 
ample vocabulary to make reading in the foreign 
tongue a pleasure and not drudgery. Of course, this 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 83 

implies in the pupil certain pronounced literary tastes 
that would induce him to continue his work alone in 
the language for the sake of becoming acquainted 
with what another race of men has thought and 
felt. 

This is by no means an unworthy object; in fact, 
no object can really be more worthy, or more im- 
portant from an educational or an intellectual point 
of view if it is attained. It is vastly more worth 
while to talk with Goethe and Schiller in their bcoks 
than to gossip about trivialities with Tom, Dick, and 
Plarry; and the teacher who has been successful 
enough to lay this thorough foundation for reading 
in any language need not blush for his work, even if 
it is the fashion nowadays to sneer at the drillers of 
irregular verbs. And if he feels the need of author- 
ity to support him in not banishing the mother tongue 
from the class room, he can find it in no less a mas j 
ter than the celebrated teacher of languages, Jacotot, 
and in the father of modern pedagogy, the great 
Comenius. 

Jacotot declared that " ever} 7 one can teach ; and 
moreover can teach what he does not know himself," 
and proved it by his own experience as professor of 
French in the university of Louvain. He had many 
pupils whose only language was Flemish and Dutch, 



84 A VALIANT WOMAN 

of which he himself knew nothing; but he did not 
make that fact a pretext for banishing the mother 
tongue. He gave his pupils Fenelon's Telemaque, 
with French on one side and a Dutch translation on 
the other; and his method was the simple one of 
comparison and memorizing, throwing the pupil en- 
tirely upon his own efforts, except in the matter of 
pronunciation. 

Comenius in his fourth principle of the facility in 
instruction and learning, after illustrating Nature's 
method of proceeding from the simple to the com- 
plex, in which man imitates her in his own efforts, 
says that this principle is exactly reversed in the 
schoolroom, when what is unknown is taught by some- 
thing equally unknown, and that this happens — 

" I. When Latin rules are communicated in Latin 
to beginners in that language. 

" II. When a Latin-German dictionary is given 
to beginners, while it is the German-Latin that should 
be given instead. For they are not trying to learn 
German by the help of Latin, but Latin is to be 
learned by the help of German, which is already 
known. 

" III. When a foreign master ignorant of his pu- 
pil's mother tongue is given to the latter. For if 
the common medium of communication is wanting to 
teacher and pupil, they can only fumble around with 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 85 

signs and guesses, and what is that but a tower of 
Babel? 



" These faults may be avoided : 

" I. When teacher and pupil speak the same lan- 
guage. 

" II. When all explanations of the unknown 
tongue are given in the known language. 

" III. When the grammar and dictionary of the 
language to be learned are suitable for the purpose. 

" IV. When the study of a new language proceeds 
step by step, so that the pupil is first accustomed to 
comprehend (for this is the easiest), then to write 
(by which, time is allowed for thinking), and last of 
all to speak (which, because it must be extempore, is 
the most difficult)." 

Leaving now the consideration of the pupils who 
would more profitably study a language in order to 
gain a reading knowledge of it, we may turn our at- 
tention to those who wish the language for purely 
commercial purposes. Here the question is not one 
of speaking correctly, but of speaking in any way 
so that it is possible to be understood. The vocabu- 
lary is built up by naming the objects in sight, by 
the aid of pictures and of action. It is a wholly ad- 
mirable method, and were it possible to extend it 



86 A VALIANT WOMAN 

over more of the pupil's time it would doubtless lead 
in the end to that accuracy which only a laborious 
drill can give. It does often reach very effective 
work, as it is ; but I have yet to learn that, with the 
time at the teacher's disposal at present, it will stand 
a vigorous general test where rigorous accuracy is 
required. But if it reaches its object by giving the 
pupil a practical vocabulary for the ordinary uses 
of life, it is all we ought to require of it. Certainly 
there is no other way of reaching this result. To 
learn to speak, we must speak. 

The fact that present results in language teach- 
ing reach neither ob j ect here proposed, — that is, 
thorough grammatical knowledge of the foreign 
tongue with ability to read the classics easily, or flu- 
ent command of the spoken language with the power 
to acquire further knowledge through reading, — 
shows the necessity of some radical change in pre- 
senting the subject. 

In the first place, whether the object be to read 
or to speak, the teacher at any rate ( Jacotot to the 
contrary) must himself know how to read and speak, 
for the river can rise no higher than its source, — 
and it is only genius that has the precious gift of 
deep and lasting inspiration to self-activity. The 
very statement of this necessity sounds like irony, 
but it would greatly surprise the general public to 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 87 

know how frequently the teacher is but little in ad- 
vance of the pupils. If the former is conscientious 
and diligent and a real learner with the latter, push- 
ing on his own knowledge as far ahead as he can, the 
result for both is by no means so indifferent as might 
be supposed. The two greatest teachers of modern 
times, Pestalozzi and Froebel, were both extremely 
ignorant so far as mere book learning goes, yet each 
was infinitely superior to the ordinary savant in the 
power of growing in knowledge and in imparting 
what he did know, and in awakening in his pupils the 
capacity for work. The well-known German geog- 
rapher, Karl Hitter, said of Pestalozzi that he knew 
less geography than a child in the primary schools, 
yet that from listening to him, he gained his chief 
knowledge of geography and first conceived the idea 
of the natural method, and that it gave him great 
pleasure to attribute to Pestalozzi whatever of value 
there was in his work. 

It is a similar self-activity which the language 
teacher must arouse before any effective work can be 
done. He himself must not be always the chief per- 
former in the class room. He must of tener be sim- 
ply the director of the pupils as performers. It is 
they who must make as much use as possible of the 
daily acquired knowledge and be stimulated to wish 
to increase it. It requires real power in a teacher to 



88 A VALIANT WOMAN 

do this, and that power is very rare, because it im- 
plies great flexibility, a certain dramatic instinct, a 
keen sense of humor, great resourcefulness, and the 
childlike gift of losing one's self entirely in the oc- 
cupation of the moment. The great language 
teacher is artist and actor and composer in one. 

But what can we do who are not artists and actors, 
but simply earnest men and women who wish to make 
our work effective and not a farce? We can decide 
to do one of two things, — teach language for the 
sake of its literature, or teach it for the purpose of 
readiness in ordinary conversation, and be quite will- 
ing to admit the limitations of each method, and the 
impossibility of combining the two with beginners. 

Suppose that we decide upon the first course. We 
shall give the pupil a good grammatical foundation, 
teaching him not necessarily in a dry and lifeless 
manner, but through vivid practical examples, and 
through the texts he reads as well as through the 
grammar. He will write frequent exercises, not dis- 
connected sentences only, but very simple themes 
which the teacher has taken the pains to discuss in 
the foreign language in order to give him a proper 
vocabulary and proper phrasing of it. The mother 
tongue will not be entirely banished from the class 
room. It will be used whenever it is necessary to 
give him clear ideas; nor will translation into the 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 89 

mother tongue be banished. On the contrary, 
wherever a difficult passage occurs, a translation into 
good idiomatic English will be required. The fact 
that even the brightest pupils will sometimes gravely 
write the most absurd drivel, the most glaring con- 
tradictions, as genuine translations and seem entirely 
unconscious of the absurdity, until the teacher points 
it out, is sufficient evidence, not only of the impor- 
tance, but of the absolute necessity, of such work, if 
we attach any value to a correct understanding of 
what is read. Pupils will be the first to laugh most 
heartily over their absurdities, and will learn that 
when they write nonsense, their translation is never 
correct, which recognition is by no means an unim- 
portant matter. 

Another very good exercise is to require the trans- 
lated text to be retranslated into the foreign tongue, 
the pupil being required to make his own corrections 
by comparing his text with the original. He should 
be encouraged to ask why his faulty construction is 
not so good as the original, and should memorize 
idiomatic expressions. This careful attention to 
form is extremely valuable to the pupil. In fact, as 
often as possible all exercises should be corrected by 
the pupil himself from a written or printed model 
placed before him, and he should be required to com- 
pare his work with it word by word and letter by 



90 A VALIANT WOMAN 

letter. Afterwards, without the model, he should re- 
write the exercise until he can do it correctly. This 
takes time, but little by little the pupil is trained to 
see accurately, which is exactly what he is unable 
to do at first. 

In this course, the texts selected for reading should 
be from the acknowledged classics. As the pupil 
advances, the recitation may be more and more 
fully conducted in the foreign language; but the 
teacher should never hesitate to require a good Eng- 
lish translation, whenever a new idiomatic expression 
or a subtlety of thought presents a difficulty. The 
pupil should be encouraged to extend his reading of 
his own accord, for which purpose a necessary num- 
ber of copies of masterpieces should be at his serv- 
ice. He should not be discouraged from getting 
help in any possible way, and if a good English trans- 
lation of his foreign text can be procured, he should 
be allowed to use it for composition and help. In 
this way a great deal more ground may be covered, 
and at the end of a four years' course the pupil will 
be able to continue his work alone, and he will also 
have learned to express himself, if not with idiomatic 
volubility, at least with sufficient correctness to make 
himself understood. 

Since Locke's defense of interlinear translations 
for the classics, there have not been wanting clever 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 91 

men who recognize their utility ; but they have never 
yet been adopted in the class room, and a certain 
stigma has been attached to their use, as if it were 
a disgrace to learn easily and quickly, instead of by 
a slow, laborious process. Gustave Le Bon in his 
Psychologie de V education recommends the use of 
translations, and says that he quickly acquired a 
reading knowledge of English by simply taking any 
English book — The Vicar of Wakefield — and read- 
ing it with the help of a French translation. How- 
ever, he condemns an interlinear translation as a 
" detestable means of learning to read a language " — 
evidently because of the distorted and unnatural form 
in which the native language must necessarily ap- 
pear, in order to be literally reproduced. He sent to 
England for translations of the works of Alexandre 
Dumas, which he had never read, and commenced 
by trying to read Monte Cristo. At the end of a 
month he was able to read the second volume in one 
night. Of course, this is the work of a trained mind 
of unusual power, but it is suggestive enough to 
show the immense advantage of such a method over 
the work at a snail's pace done in our high schools 
and colleges ; and it pleads, too, for the value of train- 
ing to read. 

This particular value has been noted by another 
eminent French author, Maurice Legendre, in his 



92 A VALIANT WOMAN 

Probleme de Veducation. He asserts that from an 
educational point of view, it is folly to wish to teach 
languages, as the child learns his mother tongue. 
" It is, in fact, impossible ; the mother tongue was as- 
sociated in us with the creation of all the ideas which 
fill the mind ; it even contributed to form these ideas : 
other languages, on the contrary, are based on a S3 r s- 
tem of ideas already formed and adapted to that sys- 
tem. . . . The so-called practical methods which are 
the rage to-day for the study of languages (which 
may be useful for commerce and travel), proceed 
with a rapidity which does honor to the faculties of 
man, or of the young man, set far above those of a 
child, but which ought to make us suspect that their 
resemblance to that of learning the mother tongue is 
quite external and illusory. We can even learn dead 
languages by these practical methods. It was the 
case with Montaigne. But the intellectual profit 
which we draw from the acquisition of a living or a 
dead language does not depend upon the manner in 
which we acquired it, but, as we shall see, by the 
familiarity which comes afterwards." 

Let us consider now the second course of language 
study, where the object is the idiomatic volubility 
which makes social intercourse easy. Here, the 
mother tongue is completely banished from the class 
room. The text-book, too, does not appear for 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 93 

the first few months. The pupil begins by learning 
the names of all the ob j ects which surround him ; the 
parts of his body, the articles of clothing he wears, 
the food he eats, the furnishings of his home, the 
familiar objects which he sees on the streets, the trees 
and flowers of the garden and park, the household 
animals, the abstractions of color, taste, smell, ac- 
tion; in short, his little external world is to be recon- 
structed for him in other terms than those he is 
familiar with; and constant repetition is the key- 
note to his progress. That is why progress, at first, 
is necessarily slow, and the short time at the teach- 
er's disposal offers a very serious obstacle to it. The 
new words are quickly forgotten, driven out of the 
mind by the rapid succession of other studies, other 
ideas, another tongue. I shall never forget the utter 
despair of a bright little French woman, not quite 
master of the English tongue, and never using it in 
the class room, who after a year's attempt in the 
public schools to instruct in this manner, without the 
use of a text-book, declared it to be utterly impos- 
sible. 

However, the method is said to be used successfully 
in Germany; only a very much longer time is given 
to the study of foreign languages, and children even 
in their hours of recreation are required to speak 
them. In the City of Mexico I met young Mexicans 



94 A VALIANT WOMAN 

whose mother tongue was Spanish, but who spoke 
French fluently. On inquiry, I found that their text- 
books in science and mathematics were in French and 
that they recited their physics and algebra in French. 
Thus, for the greater part of their school work, they 
were speaking a foreign tongue. It was as if they 
were really living in France, and the progress made 
in the language was astonishing. We are unable to 
imitate them in this respect, and therefore are fight- 
ing against immense odds, and must not condemn the 
method if we fail in it. 

When a fair vocabulary has been acquired, a text- 
book is given to the pupil, and he is taught to read. 
Here, instead of choosing a classic and giving him 
a literary vocabulary, we must be careful to put into 
his hands such books as reflect the manners and lan- 
guage of daily life. He must not be transported 
into the world of ideas, but into the world of tan- 
gible objects and everyday facts. No matter 
whether the book we give him may be called rubbish 
from an intellectual and literary standpoint, so long 
as it is clean rubbish, lighted up with a sparkle of 
everyday humor and wholesomeness, it is the right 
sort of material for exercise in the language of daily 
life. No foreigner would ever learn to speak our lan- 
guage by reading The Merchant of Venice or Para- 
dise Lost, nor are Faust and Le Cid proper models 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 95 

for the spoken language of Germany and France, 
however noble they may be as models of literary and 
intellectual power. 

Four years of such careful drill in reading, speak- 
ing, and writing the language of daily life ought to 
result in a fair command of it. We have yet to 
learn the outcome of either of these two methods of 
language study ; for, at present, our work is a mix- 
ture of both. We pass from the simple to the com- 
plex, from a fairy tale to Faust, with hardly any 
transition stage. We mingle the vocabularies of 
widely separated centuries and widely different dia- 
lects and provinces with the vocabulary of daily life ; 
in short, we are groping haphazard, without a definite 
end in view, and in that case can hardly miss failure. 

With regard to Latin and Greek, the situation is 
hardly more favorable. The result by no means jus- 
tifies the labor and time expended upon these lan- 
guages, and this department of school and college 
work finds itself in the embarrassing predicament of 
being obliged to prove that it has a right to exist 
at all as an essential part of the education of the 
young. Perhaps the question could very easily be 
decided, if we should only frankly admit publicly, 
what we know privately ; namely, that far from be- 
ing a necessity, it is not even a luxury to ninety-nine 
one-hundredths of those who study it, for they find 



96 A VALIANT WOMAN 

neither enjoyment nor culture in it. To the remain- 
ing one-hundredth per cent it is a necessity as well 
as a luxury. The question is therefore reduced to 
this: Out of a thousand pupils, have we a right to 
establish a chair of ancient languages for ten of 
them ? Most assuredly we have ! If there were only 
one pupil a year who really needed Latin and Greek 
as a part of his intellectual equipment, he should 
not be denied the right to have it in whatever public 
institution he may chance to be educated. The gar- 
dener takes especial care of his best plants ; he 
watches eagerly for any sign of superior qualities 
in order to foster them and create a more excellent 
variety. He does not neglect them to prop up the 
weaklings. We should do likewise in our gardens of 
the young. Therefore Latin and Greek for the 
sake of the superior few should always be retained 
in the curriculum of every institution of liberal cul- 
ture. The great mistake we make is to suppose them 
of any value to the immense majority. 

I have said that in the village school in which our 
valiant woman taught there w r as a Latin class of 
two pupils. She herself was a good Latin scholar, 
and speaking from the standpoint of personal ex- 
perience was inclined to favor the study of Latin as 
an intellectual discipline, even when it went no 
farther. Later, she was inclined to think that an 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 97 

equally valuable discipline might be more profitably 
obtained in other directions. Inquiring about it of 
her scholarly friends, she quotes the following letter 
from a distinguished lawyer, the argument of which 
may very well stand for the usual plea in favor of 
classical learning: 

" I was admitted to the high school," he writes, 
" when I was twelve years old. ... Of grammar, I 
knew worse than nothing, for I had studied it in 
the old-fashioned way, just long enough to gain an 
acquired ignorance of the whole subject. A year 
after I entered the high school, I began the study of 
Latin, and then the darkness that had hung over the 
English grammar was lifted; for Latin is an in- 
flected language, and from the changing terminations 
one learns what is meant by the agreement of words 
in the application of the rules of syntax. Without 
being aware of it, I had gained some insight into the 
philosophy of language. I believe no time is wasted 
in the study of Latin, even when children go no 
farther than to learn the rudiments of the language. 
There is no intellectual discipline to compare with 
it in range of power; and in its literary influence it 
endows the mind with another sense." 

This is the grateful tribute of one to whom Latin 
was a source of light and power, but he was not an 
ordinary pupil. Another very timely tribute to the 



98 A VALIANT WOMAN 

disciplinary value of classical training appears in 
the presidential address of H. A. Miers, rector of 
the London University. This address was delivered 
in 1910 at Sheffield before the educational science 
section of the British Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science. Dr. Miers says : 

" What sort of school education affords the best 
preparatory training for the university? I have 
often heard it asserted that if a boy is capable of 
taking up at the university a course which is entirely 
different from his school course, he will generally be 
found to have come from the classical side and not 
the modern side. An ordinary modern-side boy is 
rarely able to pursue profitably a literary career at 
the university, whereas it often happens that ordi- 
nary classical-side boys make excellent scientific stu- 
dents, after they have left school. I am bound to 
say that this is, on the whole, my own experience. 
It suggests that a literary education at school is at 
present a better intellectual training for general uni- 
versity work than a scientific education. If this be 
so, what is the reason? 

" There are no doubt many causes which may con- 
tribute. In some schools, the brighter boys are 
still retained on the classical side, while those who 
are more slow are left to rind their way to other sub- 
jects: and some whose real tastes have been sup- 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 99 

pressed by the uniformity of the school curriculum 
turn with relief to new studies at the university and 
pursue them with zeal. But the facts do also, I 
think, point to some defect in the present teaching of 
school science, whereby a certain narrowness and 
rigidity of mind are rendered possible. . . ." 

The fact that it is the brightest boys who profit 
by classical training is confirmed by the experience 
of the past as well as the present; and it is a great 
mistake to suppose that disinclination to classical 
studies among the majority is anything peculiar to 
our age. In the very blossom and fruit time of 
classical learning, Melanchthon, as reported by Paul- 
sen in his excellent Geschichte des Gelehrten Un- 
terrichts, complains of the indifference to Greek of 
students in general, and says : " As Homer was a 
beggar during his lifetime, so he goes begging to- 
day for listeners, so great is the contempt for what 
is most excellent ; " and he says of Latin in one of 
his discourses de miseriis paedagogorum, that " the 
complaint of iEsop's ass that he will be killed by 
the daily hardships of his life, is also the lament of 
the schoolmaster. Whenever the parents cannot get 
on with their boy any longer, they send him to the 
schoolmaster. The master speaks to him. The boy 
is absent-minded. The master hears the lesson; the 
boy delights to vex him with his mistakes. An eter- 



too A VALIANT WOMAN 

nity passes before lie knows his alphabet. This is 
the prelude; now he is to learn Latin. He is spoken 
to in Latin, and he scrapes together an answer in 
his mother tongue. He is forced to try Latin, and 
good heavens, what a spectacle he makes of him- 
self! First, he stands there, dumb as a statue; then 
he collects his wits, hunts for words, and in so do- 
ing rolls his eyes around and opens his mouth and 
gasps like an epileptic. Finally, he utters a sound, 
but in order not to be caught in an error he mur- 
murs unintelligibly, — many boys really show a 
genuine virtuosity in swallowing the final syllable. 
' Speak plainer,' shouts the teacher. He repeats 
what he has said, and what verbal monsters, contrary 
to all grammar and Latinity, he utters ! It is de- 
plorable! The pupils abhor nothing more than this. 
They must be reminded every day; and with inde- 
scribable difficulty, the teacher manages to get out 
of them one short letter in a semester. If a verse is 
required, the teacher himself must set about it, dic- 
tate the argument, supply the words, and the dicta- 
tion is copied unwillingly. Almost no one can be 
brought to do it alone, of his own accord. Then 
comes the correcting. The grammatical errors are 
corrected; the obscure passages and ambiguous ex- 
pressions are cleared up. The roughness is smoothed 
over, and the language is enlivened with figures and 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 101 

made more agreeable. Finally, with the more ad- 
vanced pupils, attention must be given to the tenor 
and the morality of the composition. Some boys 
incline to mockery, others to frivolity or arrogance, 
and the morals appear in the style. A celebrated 
general says that three things appertain to fight- 
ing; namely, that the soldiers take pleasure in it, 
that they show a feeling of honor, and that they can 
obey. The schoolmaster general cannot presuppose 
any one of these essentials. His pupils have no pleas- 
ure in their work, no feeling of honor, no spirit of 
obedience. Most of them would rather dig ditches 
than learn Latin. Really, teaching a camel to dance 
or an ass the musical scale would be a more endurable 
task." 

So much for Latin in the early years of the six- 
teenth century. Really it is difficult to decide in this 
case which deserved more pity, the teacher or the 
pupil. Certainly neither had an enviable task, and 
when we speak with regret of the decline of classical 
learning, we must not forget at what a tremendous 
sacrifice of time and labor, of tears and groans, of 
despair and disgust, a mastery of Latin and Greek 
was acquired by the scholars of the Renaissance. 

In the middle ages, education simply meant a mas- 
tery of Latin and Greek; for, with few exceptions, 
the only science and literature worth knowing were 



[02 A VALIANT WOMAN 

written in I hose Languages) and so powerful was the 
influence of the zealous study of the classics that 
il was believed possible to revive Greek and Latin 
as literary and spoken languages. They were studied 
for thai purpose. The mother tongue was practi- 
cally abandoned. Many savants refused lo Learn 
any modern language. Erasmus never spoke any- 
thing but Latin, and though he traveled in Italy re- 
fused to learn the language, and after living in 
France some time was not ashamed to say, "Who 
would not think me ridiculous if 1 should utter an 
opinion oi' a French book, I who know nothing at all 
oi' the language? M In the early half of the six- 
teenth century, literary Germany is really a Latin 
country, more than two thirds of I he literature being- 
Latin, scarcely one third German. 

In our day of small achievements in the classics, 

it is Interesting to know just how this wonderfully 

effective result was brought about; and it is not 
only Interesting but encouraging, because it shows 
US that we are doing just as much as can be reason- 
ably expected oi' us under the circumstances, and in 
accordance with the demands of the present age. 
Here 1 shall quote again from Paulsen: 

* k Until the close oi' the eighteenth century, all stu- 
dents of the German universities were giving their 
attention either to theology or jurisprudence, in 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 103 

both of which subjects eloquence and readiness of 
speech wen* the first requirements. The Learned 

world of that time lived under the impression that 
in all that 1S really essential, the Greeks had car- 
ried scientific, knowledge to an end. The idea of* 
proceeding farther was as remote to the humanists 
as to the scholastics, perhaps even more remote. 
Therefore the task of the savant was to draw from 
that, source of wisdom with confidence and to make 
use of what he learned with good taste. Literary 
ambition, accordingly, was concentrated upon rhetor- 
ical discourse. In our day we easily excuse any de- 
ficiency in form, for the sake of the content. Not so 
the humanist. Sturm judges in this way: ' Knowl- 
edge of things without tasteful presentation is bar- 
barous and ugly, and with the corruption of form, 
there creeps in among men an arrogant opinion of 
their own wisdom.' All the humanists judge in (his 
manner. Melanchthon In Encomium eloquentice is of 
the opinion that ' any one who attempts the sciences 
without the artes dicendi must miserably fail: insight 
follows eloquence as the shadow the body.' For hu- 
manism, the formula is unusually characteristic. 
One would naturally suppose that with insight comes 
the power of speed). To humanism, it is exactly 
the contrary. Wit}) the loss of speech,- - and this 
is the constantly presented philosophical history of 



104 A VALIANT WOMAN 

humanism, — the middle ages lost not merely good 
taste, but also science, morality, and religion. 

" The instruction of the higher schools, as a whole, 
was always directed towards the University, out of 
which it comes, and into which it flows, as the rivers 
receive their water from the sea, and give it back again. 
The task of this instruction was to prepare for the 
acquisition of eloquence. Reading and exercises, 
exposition and composition, as they were technically 
called, were carried on at the University in essen- 
tially the same manner, except, of course, that the 
instruction had a more elementary and scholastic 
character. 

" There are three natural grades of these exer- 
cises. ... In the first, reading and writing were 
learned from the Latin primer, and a small number 
of Latin words was faithfully drilled into the mem- 
ory. In the second grade, the study of grammar was 
formally continued; first the formal rules (ety mo- 
log ia) and then the syntax were learned by heart 
and exercised on reading matter. The generic name 
of the little grammatical text-books of the first grade 
continued to be Donatus. As text-books, little con- 
versation books were used, such as Mosellan's Pado- 
logie, the Colloquia of Erasmus, to which, in the 
course of the sixteenth century, were added many 
new ones, such as S. Heydani, Corderi colloquia. 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 105 

Camerarii praecepta morum ac vitae, Castalionis dia- 
logi sacri, and others. Along with these books were 
first used the ancient authors, the Latin iEsop, Ter- 
ence, and now and then something from Plautus ; 
later Sturm's Selections from Cicero's Letters was a 
very popular text-book. The principle guiding the 
choice is expressed in the Luneberger school regula- 
tion, * Gudt Latyn und fyn sentential.' A twofold 
advantage is expected from the latter; namely, that 
speech is enriched and the morals improved. Con- 
cerning the method of elementary instruction in 
Latin, the Wurtemberg school regulation gives de- 
tailed directions in order to show the teacher how 
to make as easy as possible for the boys the greatest 
difficulties in the language. The reading text was 
begun by the teacher's expounding it ; that is, he gave 
the pupil a literal translation of it word for word, 
and , required the pupil to repeat it after him, and 
to repeat it again the next day. In addition to that, 
every word that appeared was grammatically an- 
alyzed with regard to its relation in the sentence, and 
when necessary, it was declined or conjugated. . . . 
" The reading exercises were completed by exer- 
cises in writing (exercitia styli). Every Wednesday, 
so prescribes the Wurtemberg regulation, a brief, 
easy argument from the last lesson is to be put into 
German. As many expressions and words of the 



106 A VALIANT WOMAN 

original Latin as is compatible with a change of text 
are retained. This is now to be dictated to the boys, 
and the place where the argument is to be found in 
the text is shown them, so that they may have some 
sort of a guide, and may more easily imitate the 
* phrases autorum ' out of the given 4 lectionibus '■; 
but the teacher is to change the genera, numeros, 
personas, casus, modos, and tempora. 

" On the following Friday the teacher collects the 
essays from the boys and shows each of them, in a 
plain and friendly manner, the mistakes and de- 
fects of his composition. A great deal of patience 
is required for this task, especially in ' exercitia 
styli, 9 for, as the boys frequently fail, they will be- 
come discouraged and listless if they are harshly cen j 
sured. 

" After the elementary grammar has been learned, 
the real instruction in eloquence may begin in the 
third grade. The grammatical study is repeated, 
broadened, deepened, and completed by rhetoric and 
dialectics. The reading is more extensive. Virgil 
and Cicero make the substance of the school 
reading in Latin of the upper grades; but Ter- 
ence, Ovid, as well as Horace and Catullus are 
read. Cicero appears to have the preference 
over other prose writers. Here, too, theoretical in- 
struction and reading go hand in hand. Rhetoric 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 107 

and dialectics find their application in Cicero's 
Orations. . . . 

" Practice in writing, from the lowest to the high-* 
est grade, keeps step with practice in speaking. In 
the upper grades, as well as in the University, Latin 
is the medium of oral instruction and social inter- 
course among teachers and pupils. The Universities 
and Gymnasien are like isolated and dispersed prov- 
inces of an international kingdom of learning in 
which Latin is the language of the country, and the 
use of any other is forbidden by punishment. In all 
the school regulations of the sixteenth century, the 
law prevails that whoever in this island of the Latin 
tongue allows himself to be heard speaking the vul- 
gar tongue is to be punished. Spies are appointed 
to see that the law is not violated, and any culprit 
found is to be branded by the placard asinus, which 
must be worn where it is plainly visible. Whoever 
has to wear this badge of disgrace three times, and 
whoever has to wear it last, poenas luet nations. . I . . 

" The completion of eloquence is poetry, that is, 
readiness of representation in rhythmical speech It 
is absolutely indispensable to the real savant. 
6 Whoever has not exercised himself in poetry,' writes 
Melanchthon in a letter to Micyllus in 1526, . . . 
6 has no correct judgment in any department of learn- 
ing, and even the prose which is not based on poetical 



1 68 A VALIANT WOMAN 

art is wanting in taste and strength.' Melanchthon's 
judgment, often repeated in his letters and other 
writings, is an expression of the general opinion of 
all humanists. Latin verses are the masterpieces of 
the arts. Nobody is a master of eloquence who has 
not the power of poetical representation, therefore 
the humanists everywhere call themselves poets and 
are known as such. This opinion is, of course, based 
upon the idea that poetry is an art which can be 
learned by anybody through diligence and practice, 
even if a natural talent for it is not equally dis- 
tributed among all men. This is one of the funda- 
mental views of humanism; it rules all poetical liter- 
ature up to the Sturm und Drang epoch, which, 
looked at from this point of view, may be regarded 
as a revolt against the aesthetic ideas of humanism. 
This accepted idea of the importance of poetry is 
the reason of the school exercises in verse. It was 
not assumed that every pupil would make his mark 
as a poet, but he must at least learn to make his 
distichs for domestic use, since the practice would 
give excellence to his prose ; much as an athlete must 
practice leaping with weights, in order to make a 
much longer jump without them. Poetical school 
exercises began in the upper grade with the learn- 
ing of poetical rules, and prosody, and practice in 
verse making. ... As late as the nineteenth cen- 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 109 

tury, in many schools, Latin verses were the final 
standard of progress, or, at least, of distinction. . . . 

" Instruction in reading and writing Latin begins 
when the pupil is six years old. At nine, he begins 
the formal study of grammar; at twelve, instruc- 
tion in eloquence and imitation of authors, which con- 
tinues until he is seventeen, to which is added a two 
years' course in artibus." 

This quotation is sufficient to show us that a 
mastery of Latin and Greek was acquired at the ex- 
pense of the mother tongue throughout the entire 
school life. We could not pay that price for it now, 
simply because the results would not justify it. We 
know that the ancients had by no means exhausted 
the riches of science, nor the riches of thought and 
feeling. Other great national literatures have arisen 
as well worth our time and study as that of the an- 
cients. Besides, the ancient writers have all been so 
adequately translated, that it is not necessary to know 
Latin and Greek in order to familiarize ourselves 
with their thought. Hence the reaction against 
classical studies, so noticeable at present, and so 
much deplored by the lovers of Latin and Greek that 
they are willing to make almost any concession in 
the manner of teaching them, in order to retain them 
in the curriculum of the secondary schools. But 
their problem is much simpler than that of the mod- 



no A VALIANT WOMAN 

ern language teacher. It is no longer required 
that the dead languages shall be learned for the pur- 
pose of speaking them. The question, therefore, is, 
What is the readiest and most effective way of giv- 
ing a good reading knowledge of them? Le Bon ad- 
vises the same method which he himself so successfully 
adopted for learning English, the reading of at 
least twenty volumes, by the aid of good transla- 
tions ; but he adds that as this method makes the 
intervention of professors absolutely useless, it has 
no chance whatever of being recommended by them. 
Since, therefore, we must admit the help of the 
professor, there really seems to be no better way 
than the good old-fashioned one of thorough, faithful 
drill on forms as a foundation, accompanied by the 
reading of easy texts, explained and translated first 
by the teacher, carefully studied by the pupil and 
reproduced by him in writing from a faithful trans- 
lation, which he himself has made. In this way, 
little by little a vocabulary is built up and peculiar 
idiomatic constructions are noted. Then, a more hu- 
man interest in the classics might be awakened by 
a discussion of the text as a medium of ideas, instead 
of insisting continually upon forms. For example, 
a boy who has been parsed through his Caesar, with- 
out having his interest and enthusiasm aroused for 
the personality of his hero, has missed that which is 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES in 

far more valuable to him than knowing that the sub- 
junctive is required in indirect discourse. How the 
advantage of the seeing eye might be brought home to 
him in Caesar's experience with the merchants. Be- 
fore setting out for Great Britain, he called a coun- 
cil of merchants from all sides to find out from them 
something about the island and its inhabitants, but 
he could learn nothing from them. They could not 
tell him the size of the island, nor the number of 
its inhabitants, nor what manner of men they were, 
nor how they fought, how they lived, or what sort 
of harbors they had. Yet these merchants had been 
trading with Britain for many years. But they 
had eyes and intelligence only for their articles of 
trade. Again, Caesar's indomitable courage cannot 
but awaken a wholesome admiration, if dwelt upon 
with any degree of enthusiasm. No difficulty dis- 
courages him. It seems as if he, too, had left the 
word " impossible " out of his vocabulary. He comes 
to the Rhine with a large army. In ten days he 
builds a bridge for their crossing, and the important 
thing is not whether he built it near the present site 
of Bonn or not, but that he did build it in this short 
space of time, and was not hindered by the waters 
in his determination to march onwards. And what 
firmness he adds to his courage! He knew men 
through and through. His " no " is no, and his 



H2 A VALIANT WOMAN 

" yes " is yes ; there is no wavering in purpose. 
When he crosses into Britain for the second time, 
he fears an uprising of the Gauls, and to check it, 
he decides to force his captives, his hostages, to take 
the voyage with him. Dumnorix the iEduan begs 
to be allowed to stay; he says that he is afraid of 
the journey, and finally urges his religious scruples 
against it. But Caesar is inflexible, and will not 
heed his entreaties, and when he escapes in the con- 
fusion of breaking up camp, Caesar sends after him, 
commanding him to be taken dead if he cannot be 
taken alive, and Dumnorix is killed. 

When Caesar is absent from his soldiers, the heart 
and head are gone. There is neither true counsel 
nor true courage among them. Witness the dissen- 
sions in camp in Book V, the controversy as to whether 
the soldiers shall take the enemy's advice and leave 
their winter quarters, or stay where they are. At 
last they yield to the promptings of fear and break 
up camp, only to find the enemy lying in ambush for 
them. What a picture of confusion follows ! Ti- 
turius, who had counseled the movement, loses his 
presence of mind. Lucius Cotta, who had been 
against it, performs the duties of a general. He or- 
ders the soldiers to leave their baggage and draw up 
in a circle. But it is not Caesar who commands and 
infuses his own splendid courage and firmness into the 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 113 

soldiers, and what weeping we have! What scram- 
bling after what each soldier holds dearest in his 
baggage! The future vanishes in the fleeting pres- 
ent as it does with all short-sighted people. Con- 
trast with this weakness of the Romans the fine 
counsel of the barbarian leaders at this moment. No 
plundering! No touching now what these Romans 
are leaving! To the present business only, which is 
to rout them! And by this counsel they gain the 
day, and the Roman eagle trails a broken wing ! 

Add to this revelation of Caesar's power his quick 
intelligence and eager curiosity in all directions. He 
is no mere brutal personification of egotism; he is 
a student, a thinker, an observer. The manners and 
religion of the Gauls interest him keenly and he 
gives a terse account of them, thus bequeathing a val- 
uable contribution to history. But we have also a 
singular instance of the fact that a man's judgment 
is limited by his experience and the knowledge of his 
era, in this same keen-sighted, brilliant Caesar who 
shows a remarkable credulity in reporting the strange 
beasts to be found in the Hercynian forest ; — the 
beast with one horn in the middle of its forehead, the 
elks without joints, that are unable to lie down and 
when they wish to rest lean against trees. 

Surely the detaching of a great personality like that 
of Caesar with all its inspiring qualities of courage, 



H4 A VALIANT WOMAN 

firmness, intellectual curiosity, and sympathy with' 
his fellow-soldiers, the simplicity of his life among 
them, the endurance of personal discomfort, fatigue, 
hunger, cold, is really the valuable kernel underneath 
the husk and shell of the Latin language for the 
student of the Commentaries, and he should not be 
deprived of his kernel, after struggling with the shell 
and the husk. In the same way Cicero's orations 
furnish valuable opportunities for teaching political 
truths, and in Virgil the student drinks from the foun- 
tain of poetry itself, and his imagination should be 
delighted and stimulated. This delight, this inspira- 
tion, this privilege of associating with the courageous, 
the strong, the eloquent, the noble, are the reasons 
why Latin and Greek are studied. This is intellec- 
tual discipline in the highest sense, and parsing and 
construing are but the steps which lead to the en- 
trance of this temple of intellectual joy. It is be- 
cause the student so rarely gets beyond the steps that 
the value of classical studies has been so generally 
denied in our day. 

In a review of Ludwig Hahn's Public Instruction 
in France, which appeared in 1848, Renan quotes 
with approval the German professor's criticism of 
university instruction in the classics ; and because it 
is as true to-day and in other countries than France 



INSTRUCTION IN LANGUAGES 115 

as when it was first written, it deserves to be re- 
peated here. 

" It heaps up with superabundance classical ma- 
terial, but without vivifying it by the literary spirit; 
the antique forms circulate daily, but the sense of 
antique beauty is profoundly wanting; polished 
stones are laboriously collected for building, but they 
never rise in a harmonious edifice; the student never 
passes from an arid exercise of intelligence to a 
vital nourishment of the entire spiritual man. 
Everything is limited to mean and narrow applica- 
tions: in place of strengthening the intellectual 
faculties, in place of a development in which beauty 
of form is in harmony with the progress of reason, 
the student simply acquires a singular skill in dis- 
guising to himself and to others emptiness of thought 
under a hollow, dazzling, and pompous form. It is 
imagined that the philological traditions of Port 
Royal are preserved and continued; the nation has 
been promised fruits comparable to those produced 
by this vigorous school, — a new golden age in liter- 
ature ; but it has not been perceived that of all this 
classical culture, the bark and not the fruit has been 
seized, so that instead of elevating the mind, this 
culture has ended only in increasing the malady of 
the century wholly external in its thinking and pro- 
foundly attacked by materialism. A narrow and 



n6 A VALIANT WOMAN 

formal spirit is the characteristic trait of instruction 
in France: it is not a true culture of the mind: it is 
the caricature of it." 

When we try to estimate the value of languages as 
a means of this " true culture of the mind," we 
ought to think carefully over the trenchant presenta- 
tion of the matter by Trapp, professor of pedagogy 
at the University of Halle in the eighteenth century, 
in the following lines : " Language consists of the 
symbols of ideas. An idea needs only one symbol to 
be understood or to be communicated. If I could 
say the Lord's Prayer in a hundred languages, I 
could not understand it any better. A multitude of 
languages does not lead to an improvement and in- 
crease of ideas. This end is rather hindered than 
advanced by the learning of many languages, for 
time and strength are exhausted in this direction 
which might have been employed in increasing the 
store of ideas. The learning of a foreign language 
is therefore a necessary evil, — necessary on account 
of the unavoidable association between nations, not 
only for the sake of trade and commerce, but also for 
the communication of knowledge." 



CHAPTER IV 

INSTRUCTION IN SCIENCE AND HISTORY 

TN that terrible and pathetic satire on practical 
education, Hard Times, Dickens makes Thomas 
Gradgrind, the schoolmaster of facts, say to his chil- 
dren, Louisa and Thomas, who have been caught 
peeping under a tight board fence to catch a glimpse 
of some strolling actors: 

" ' You ! Thomas and you, to whom the circle of 
sciences is open ; Thomas and you who may be said 
to be replete with facts ; Thomas and you who have 
been trained to mathematical exactness 1 Thomas 
and you, here! In this degraded position! I am 
amazed ! ' " 

Mrs. Gradgrind feebly reinforces the amazement 
with a command to the children to " go and be some- 
thingological directly." 

When in the face of the elaborate instruction in 
the physical sciences, mathematics, and logic, given 
so freely and with such apparent thoroughness to 
the youth of the United States, we find so great a 
number of our citizens adopting with enthusiasm 
the wildest vagaries of thought, or rather though t- 

117 



n8 A VALIANT WOMAN 

lessness, travestying science in the name of religion, 
and accepting the phenomena of hypnotism and hys- 
teria as evidence of the divine afflatus, making new 
faith-cloaks out of old, worn-out rags of supersti- 
tion, preaching senseless negations of facts and the 
silliest optimism in the face of the saddest tragedies, 
peeping at the occult through the tight board fence 
of materialism, we are tempted to repeat Gradgrind's 
cry of amazement, and to ask ourselves of what edu- 
cational service our facts, our mathematics, our 
logic have been to our Thomases and Louisas, when 
they have ended in their absolute incapacity to rea- 
son! There is only one conclusion at which it is 
possible to arrive, and that is, that the main purposes 
for which science is studied have been lost sight of 
in a superfluity of details in instruction. 

What are these main purposes? To awaken a 
spirit of observation and furnish to the mind mate- 
rial for exhaustless wonder and delight. To give, 
breadth and tolerance to the mind and clear it of 
base fears and superstitions. To produce an open, 
unprejudiced attitude of the intellect, equally re- 
mote from blind faith in the power of human rea- 
son and from an obstinate skepticism concerning its 
power to arrive at truth. Both attitudes are equally 
superficial, says Poincare. " To doubt everything 
or to believe everything are two solutions equally 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 119 

convenient, for they both exempt us from thinking." 
And it ought also to be the purpose of science to 
furnish a certain degree of practical skill in the appli- 
cation of what has been learned, to the common needs 
of daily life. To know the principles of the venti- 
lation of buildings; to be able to find the points of 
the compass in a wood; to know the medical proper- 
ties of common plants, and the conditions for fer- 
tility of soil; to know how to take care of the body, 
and the nutritive value of different foods ; to be f a- 
miliar with simple practical expedients in case of ac- 
cidents, — surely all these things are eminently worth 
while. 

The trouble with the teaching of science is that we 
are more intent upon naming things than in know^ 
ing them and coming into loving and intimate re- 
lations with them. This wonderful nature in which 
we are submerged as the fish in water, is less to our 
girls than a bright ribbon or a new hat, and far less 
interesting to our boys than a tennis racket or a foot- 
ball. Thoreau records that he once received from 
the secretary of the Association for the Advancement 
of Science at Washington a circular requesting him 
to fill out the blanks opposite certain questions, the 
most important of which was : " In what branch of 
science are you particularly interested?" He says: 
" How absurd, that though I probably stand as near 



120 A VALIANT WOMAN 

to nature as any of them, and am by constitution 
as good an observer as most, yet a true account of 
my relations to nature would excite their ridicule 
only. If it had been the secretary of an association 
of which Plato or Aristotle was the president, I 
should not have hesitated to describe my studies at 
once, and particularly." 

It was because his facts had flowered and fruited 
into truths that fed his soul that he knew that they 
would not be recognized by the Scientific Association 
at Washington. It was because nature had become 
to him, not something that he could weigh and meas- 
ure, but an infinitely sweet and subtle companion, full 
of suggestiveness, full of inspiration, keeping him al- 
ways true to his highest instincts, and lifting him 
above the ordinary level of coarse ambitions and vul- 
gar hopes and fears. 

" The philosophic spirit," says Fouillee, " is rec- 
ognized in the sciences as in literature, according 
to Leibnitz, by the fact that it searches in every- 
thing for what is the highest: investigandum in 
unoquoque genere summum. There, too, is the whole 
secret of instruction. But to make known to others 
the summits of things, we must have climbed up to 
them ourselves*" 

My valiant teacher had climbed these summits. 
For her, too, fact had blossomed into truth and joy 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 121 

and she found the noblest pleasure in the simplest 
things, because she could weave about them so much 
vivid fancy and living thought. She takes a car 
ride, finds the scarlet pimpernel at the end of it, and 
is happy for the day. She loves the wild flowers 
as if they were human and regrets that she scarcely 
meets any one who loves them so well as the garden 
flowers. Nothing disagreeable ever keeps her from 
her forest friends. She calls it paying the price for 
her pleasure. The pine woods of New Jersey, the 
forests of Massachusetts and Michigan, the prairies 
of Illinois and Missouri, the hillsides of Southern 
California, and the plains of New Mexico are her 
favorite haunts. She never tires of expressing her 
joy and wonder at the beauty of the world which the 
masses never know, because they are absorbed in 
the finery of man's make. She carries about with 
her the freedom and grace that belong to the large, 
fluid, unconventional life of nature-lovers. There is 
the sweet breath of the fresh air in her manner, in 
her thoughts, as if with her it were spring and the 
growing time all the year round. 

To love in this way the beauty and wonders of 
nature in their various manifestations, to catch a 
glimpse of the heights, even if they may not be 
climbed, and feel the pettiness of the countless trivial- 
ities that seam and scar our life with fact and worry 



122 A VALIANT WOMAN 

seems to me one of the most vital aims of scientific 
study for the great majority of pupils, who will not 
specialize in any branch of it after leaving school. 

It must never be forgotten that mere facts do not 
constitute knowledge, but only the raw material of 
it, and for the pupils whom we have just mentioned, 
there is a vast amount of dry, unnecessary details 
in the text-books now in use which it would be far 
better to omit. I allude particularly to the puzzling 
problems in physics and chemistry, the accumulation 
of technical terms and symbols, and the detailed de- 
scription of complicated machines concerning which 
it is not at all necessary to be informed in order to 
know the vital facts of the science in question. Then, 
too, the utterly uninteresting manner of presenting 
these facts acts as a narcotic instead of a stimulant 
on the immature intellect, so that any series of ably 
written lectures on scientific subjects, like those of 
Tyndall or Huxley, for example, would produce a 
profounder and more lasting impression upon the 
pupil and therefore be immensely more valuable than 
the text-books. But we can never hope for any such 
exchange. Pedantry is as timid in the presence of 
original thought as a hare before the hunter. Be- 
sides, all text-books quietly draw a veil over the most 
important conclusions of science and confine them- 
selves to defining and explaining definitions, so that 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 123 

the pupil may be said to hold out his hand for bread 
only to receive a stone. No wonder, then, that he 
seeks his bread elsewhere and sometimes mistakes a 
sponge for it; and yet there is such good bread in 
the study of science to be had for the proper work- 
ing for it, that it is a shame to have furnished our 
schools with such costly laboratories just to miss it, 
as the prevalent superstitions of our country prove 
that we have done. 

The most eminent teachers of science in our coun- 
try feel keenly that much time is lost by the pupil's 
hopelessly floundering in a confusion of words that 
speak to no experience which he has had, and that 
new and difficult subjects should be studied in the 
class room under the intelligent guidance of the 
teacher. In the course of an article on Physics and 
Manual Training, Principal G. B. Morrison of the 
McKinley High School, St. Louis, says pertinently: 

" The mistake made in teaching physics lies in pre- 
senting formulas for verification, instead of con- 
structing formulas from experience. A formula 
should be nothing more than a statement in mathe- 
matical form of something which the student knows 
from experience, seen in his experiments — nothing 
but a writing down in simple symbolic language the 
generalized results of his work, simply stating what 
he already knows. The formula is of use to him, be- 



124 A VALIANT WOMAN 

cause it may serve a purpose in other and trans- 
posed forms in the solution of problems involving 
calculations which transcend experimentation. But 
the general formula is not only easy of comprehen- 
sion, but it is already known as soon as the student 
has really grasped anything of the real content of 
the principle sought. The trouble is not that too 
much and too early mathematics is insisted on, but 
that the mathematics is presented at the wrong end 
of the process. 

" I shall agree that the high school text-books are 
not only faulty in method of presentation, but that 
they are growing worse! They begin by a mathe- 
matical statement ' to be proved ' instead of end- 
ing with a mathematical statement of facts actually 
seen, and I am at a loss to understand how men com- 
petent to grasp the subject of physics and to write 
books on it can so completely ignore the first princi- 
ples of mental acquisition, and leave entirely out of 
consideration the mind of the pupil beginner. 

" Take for illustration an example from one of 
the too numerous popular text-books: under the 
topic of acceleration, the author first gives a formal 
definition of acceleration in the following words: 
' Acceleration is the time rate of change of velocity.' 
This must be a precious morsel to a young beginner 
who has never in his life had any conscious cxperi- 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 125 

ence in observing either ' time rate ' or ' accelera- 
tion ' ! This is followed by ' formulas for uniformly 
accelerating motion,' as follows : ' Let a be the ac- 
celeration or the gain in velocity per second acquired 
in a second of time (unless otherwise stated, the unit 
of time used will be the second, common or mean 
solar time, of which there are 86,400 in a mean solar 
day). Then in t seconds, the velocity acquired will 
be v = at. Since the gain in velocity is uniform, 
if the body starts from rest, the average for t sec- 
onds is %(# + at) or % at. The distance passed 
over in t seconds is then % at X t or % at 2 . Hence 
s = at 2 : 

" I of course do not complain of the accuracy of 
these statements. I quote them simply to show how 
ridiculous is such an introduction to this subject to 
an inexperienced beginner. Following this formula 
is given a list of problems to be solved by it. The 
student having no actual conception of the true 
relations of the facts which these symbols represent 
hunts through his problem for what he thinks corre- 
sponds to the symbol for 6 distance,' for ' accelera- 
tion,' and for * time ' and substitutes these in his 
6 formula.' This involves no more thought than 
would be required in hunting among a lot of assorted 
corks for the right ones to fit bottles of various sizes. 
Atwood's Machine, an apparatus for showing accel- 



126 A VALIANT WOMAN 

erated motion, is given in the book just quoted sev- 
eral pages in advance of these problems as * an 
experimental proof ' of the law of accelerated mo- 
tion. 

" Now, if a beginner started with this, or better, 
with a simple ball and inclined plane, he could see 
the acceleration, and time it in a very simple and 
natural way, and a record of his observations would 
constitute his formula — nothing more than an ab- 
breviated generalized statement of what he had seen. 
When a problem is then stated, he thinks in form, 
instead of in the symbol. In other words, he usually 
thinks, instead of groping after the intangible. He 
is not discouraged, because he knows what he is do- 
ing. He likes physics, because he understands it. 
The mathematics as such disappears, and he rapidly 
acquires a grasp and an easy comprehension of the 
whole subject. Accuracy in experimentation be- 
comes a pleasure, because a necessity. The student's 
pleasure grows with his own conscious power, which 
as we all know is the keenest of all human pleasures. 

" Every teacher seems ready to accept as sound 
pedagogics that, in teaching, we should proceed 
from the concrete to the abstract ; but in most of 
our modern text-books the reverse is actually prac- 
ticed. It would be more in accordance with sound 
teaching to open the subject of accelerated motion 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 127 

with a picture of a boy sliding downhill, than with 
a meaningless formula. In looking at the picture, 
the student immediately associates the lesson with 
a pleasurable experience, the philosophy of which he 
is eager to comprehend. This comprehension comes 
to his mind in all its fullness in the formula which 
results from the experience of this observation, but 
never from the formula before the terms of which 
have become symbolic of his actual perceptions. 
There is a place for the picture, and a place for the 
formula; the one gives a natural and pleasurable in- 
troduction, the other gives a satisfying sense of 
power possessed by every conclusion reached by nor- 
mal processes. . . . 

" Instead of deferring mathematics to the latter 
part of the student's course, I would defer it to the 
latter part of each lesson. ... Of course, I do not 
mean that elementary students are brought at once 
to expressions involving mathematics which they 
have not mastered, or that the elementary lesson 
should be final; far from it. I simply mean that 
mathematics, as an important and necessary tool of 
physics study, should be employed by the student 
from the first to the last day of his course. 

" The ' fascination ' of the lecture . . . has its 
dangers. Important as it is that the interest of the 
student be secured, it should not be done at the ex- 



128 A VALIANT WOMAN 

pense of the working power of the mind. It must 
be confessed that the 6 fascinating ' lecture too often 
obstructs the progress of the student. He comes to 
regard the subject as a sort of vaudeville show, or 
an exhibition of sleight of hand which begins and 
ends in mere entertainment. It is not uncommon to 
see an audience held in almost breathless attention by 
some scientific spellbinder, while he ' demonstrates ' 
the wondrous laws of the known and the unknown by 
skillfully manipulated apparatus, and it is notable 
how little the audience really knows of the principles 
treated, after the lecture is over and the ' fascina- 
tion ' wears off. This kind of treatment may make 
pupils ' walking interrogation points about ether, 
atoms, X-rays, nature of electricity, etc.,' but it does 
little toward giving them the power of intelligently 
answering these interrogations. The lecture may 
have its use, but it becomes dangerous as a teaching 
agency when followed as a business. 

" The problem of teaching physics properly is not 
one especially of the high schools or the college; it 
is one including as a necessary part of the process a 
proper study of the mind of the student. Lack of 
interest and comprehension of physics is quite as 
common among college 6 men ' as among high school 
boys, and proper presentation in college classes is 
no more common than it is in the high school." 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 129 

The teaching implied in this quotation is that 
which leads to the chewing and digesting of informa- 
tion, instead of bolting it whole to be relieved of it 
in the same condition. It is the building up of 
definitions through experience, step by step in a log- 
ical proceeding, instead of starting with them, as is 
the common practice. Interest and attention are 
maintained because the pupil himself is at work 
and naturally is always more interested in what he 
does himself than in what is done for him. To keep 
up this interest in natural phenomena Herbert Spen- 
cer suggests that young people should always have 
on their minds problems to be solved concerning what 
they observe in their surroundings and in human 
life ; and adds that " a teacher who understood his 
business would be continually desiring questions of 
these and countless other kinds to which no answers 
could be found in books, and would persistently re- 
fuse to give the answers: leaving the question to be 
puzzled over for years if need were. The mental ex- 
ercise which solving one such question implies is of 
more value than that implied by a dozen rote-learnt 
lessons." 

Spencer is right, because the one fundamental truth 
not to be lost sight of in teaching any branch of 
natural science is the truth of relation and of 
sequence; the one error to be guarded against, the 



130 A VALIANT WOMAN 

mistaking of coincidences for causes. The student is 
not to become a "laboratory rat,' 5 as Claude Bernard 
calls the master of any department of experimental 
science, but he is to know the larger generalizations 
of the specialist's work, and their bearing on the 
great problems of human life. He is to know the 
difference between a hypothesis and a verified fact, 
so that he cannot be thrown into a state of absolute 
negation of the value of science, when he sees a cher- 
ished hypothesis abandoned to make room for a bet- 
ter one. He is to love truth far better than his fan- 
cied notions of what it is or ought to be, and he is 
to scorn no form of it, even when it is most unflatter- 
ing to his vanity. 

What has been said of the teaching of physics ap- 
plies to all other branches of natural science ; the 
essential is not to be crowded out by the unimportant. 
The naming of things is not to be confused with the 
knowing of them. Concerning anatomy and physi- 
ology, Sir John Russell Reynolds, president of the 
Royal College of Physicians of London, says in one of 
a series of five Essays and Addresses: 

" It has always appeared to me that a vast amount 
of valuable time is literally wasted on anatomy, and 
especially that branch of it termed descriptive anat- 
omy. . . . What is the good of all this? How 
much of minute descriptive anatomy do we any of us 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 131 

remember? How much less do we find of real value 
in our daily work? How should we stand in a stiff 
examination now? We should many of us positively 
flounder on our 6 bones.' . . . For the practical use 
that is made of anatomy in after years, I believe that 
six months' genuine work would be fully sufficient, 
and the ordinary student would then save time to 
ground himself well, instead of 6 grinding ' himself 
wretchedly, in physiology, pathology, medicine, and 
surgery." 

If this is true of the medical student whose life 
work it is to be, how much more is it true of the 
high school student or college man, for whom the 
subject simply happens to be in his course. What 
he needs particularly is acquaintance with the funda- 
mental laws of health, the knowledge of how to take 
care of his body. He should know food values, the 
necessity of exercise, fresh air, the way to avoid tak- 
ing cold, so that when he is really ill, he may not be 
at the mercy of faddists, or of those who deny the 
existence of his body. Even the correction of popu- 
lar current fallacies would be of immense service to 
him ; for example, " Feed a cold and starve a fever," 
which as originally and properly uttered, ran — " If 
you feed a cold, you will have a fever to starve." 
The public, in its heedless way of repeating an epi- 
gram, exactly reversed this one, so that many a body 



132 A VALIANT WOMAN 

already clogged with a cold has had its burden in- 
creased, instead of lightened, as it should be. 

As for the science of mathematics, it, too, is not 
escaping the shears of the ruthless pruner. Valued 
traditionally as the science of pure thought, capable 
of training the mind to close logical thinking as no 
other branch of learning can possibly do it, it has 
been weighed in the balance and found singularly 
wanting. The truth is now universally recognized 
that while the mathematician may reason closely and 
accurately in the realm of space and numbers, he is 
no more exempt from failures in rational thinking in 
other directions than if he had never opened an alge- 
bra or geometry in his life. In his Re forme de 
V enseignement par la philosophie, Fouillee admir- 
ably observes: 

" The exclusive study of the sciences without phi- 
losophy is dangerous. The rigor of the mathematical 
method too often prevents the mathematician from 
having himself a rigorous intellect. His formulas 
think for him and he falls into the habit of using 
them without really thinking himself. It is the par- 
rotism of which Leibnitz speaks, but a parrotism 
so well organized that in its own domain it ends with 
making words the instruments of truth. Unfortu- 
nately, outside of this domain, the automatism reap- 
pears, too frequently contenting itself with formulas 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 133 

even when there are no longer any definite ideas in 
them. . . . Listen to a mathematician reason of 
things not mathematical: nine times out of ten, you 
will be struck with his incapacity of attention to sev- 
eral things together, with his feebleness of reasoning 
as soon as he is no longer sustained by symbols whose 
combinations are almost mechanical." 

Mathematics is not, then, the open gateway to uni- 
versal rationality. In fact, the most phenomenal cal- 
culators of whom we have any record seem rather to 
have been wanting in balance of mind than to have 
been remarkable for this poise. Neither can very 
much be said for the practical value of mathematics 
in the ordinary walks of life. Professor D. S. Smith 
of Teachers College, Columbia University, New 
York, says in his very interesting book, The Teach- 
ing of Geometry: 

" Geometry is not studied and never has been 
studied because of its positive utility in commercial 
life or even in the workshop. . . . All of the facts 
that a skilled mechanic or an engineer would ever need 
could be taught in a few lessons. All the rest is 
either obvious, or is commercially or technically use- 
less. . . . The actual amount of algebra needed by 
a foreman in a machine shop can be taught in about 
four lessons at the most. The necessary trigo- 
nometry may take eight more. . . . The boy who 



134 A VALIANT WOMAN 

takes such a course would know as much about mathe- 
matics as a child who has read ten pages in a primer 
would know about literature, but he would have 
enough for his immediate needs even though he had 
no appreciation of mathematics as a science. If any 
one asks if this is not all the school should give him, 
it might be well to ask if the school should give only 
the ability to read without the knowledge of any good 
literature ; if it should give only the ability to sing 
without the knowledge of good music; if it should 
give only the ability to speak without any training 
in the use of good language, and if it should give a 
knowledge of home geography without any intimation 
that the world is round, an atom in the unfathomable 
universe about us. . . . 

" There are relatively few propositions in geometry 
that have any practical applications that are even hon- 
est in their pretenses. . . . There is noble dignity 
in geometry . . . but the best way to destroy this 
dignity, to take away the appreciation of pure mathe- 
matics, and to furnish weaker candidates than now 
for advance in this field is to deceive our pupils and 
ourselves into believing that the ultimate purpose of 
mathematics is to measure things in a way in which 
no one else ever measures them, or has measured 
them." 

While insisting then that geometry as a subject 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 135 

of cultural study has its value in the higher pleasure 
it affords to the mind, and the stimulus and uplift 
it gives, Professor Smith is not blind to the fact that 
comparatively few only are capable of getting the 
highest value from its study, and says that he recog- 
nizes " that the recent growth in popular education 
has brought into the high school a less carefully 
selected type of mind than was formerly the case, 
and that for this type a different kind of mathemat- 
ical training will naturally be developed." 

The fact that we must accommodate our food to 
the digestive capacity of the stomach, literally and 
figuratively, has led many thoughtful teachers to feel 
in the presentation of elementary geometry the neces- 
sity of interesting the pupil by giving a concrete 
setting to abstract principles, until by proper guid- 
ance he is gradually led to interest himself in the 
latter. Neither is the obvious relation of lines and 
angles, etc., to be insisted upon to the weariness of 
the pupil who feels that he is wasting his time in 
trivialities. "What's the use of it?" is the first 
question which the average pupil asks, and he can see 
no use in fruitless repetition of what he already 
knows, and he can see no service in speculations that 
do not lead to what he can touch and see. Therefore 
if his geometry can teach him to determine the height 
of a tree, or the distance from a given point to a 



136 A VALIANT WOMAN 

remote bowlder, he finds a result which he is able to 
appreciate, although he is as yet infinitely remote 
from the real purpose and dignity of his subject. 
Whether such superficial treatment of a great sub- 
ject is worth while or not, is a debatable question 
which I shall not attempt to solve, but shall pass on 
to the consideration of history in our schools. 

With regard to history, I shall not discuss the 
question whether it may or may not be properly 
called a science, contenting myself with remarking 
that the human factor introduces an element of un- 
certainty into every problem into which it enters ; 
then, too, the human mind striving to reconstruct 
the past lends its personal coloring to the story so 
that we can never know the past as it really was. 
Professor G. Monod, teacher of history in the Pari- 
sian Ecole des Hautes Etudes, writes : " Zola defined 
art as ' nature seen through a temperament.' We, 
too, see historical reality through a temperament. 
We study it as history, but when we wish to reanimate 
it, in order to understand and represent it, we must 
exert a personal creative activity and add art to sci- 
ence. Historical reality is never known to us in the 
unconditioned and exact truth of its infinite complica- 
tions. It is almost a dream-history." 

Fouillee goes even farther and declares that, so far, 
history has not been what it should be, and is neither 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 137 

a true science nor an art of really educational value ; 
and that there never has been and never can be a per- 
fectly exact and scientific history. 

However, history continues to have an important 
place in our curriculum, and it is worth while to con- 
sider what is most essential in it for the culture of 
the young. Specialization has introduced into our 
high school and college work the very serious fault 
of exaggerated values. In the high schools of small 
towns where one teacher is supposed to conduct classes 
in any branch of the curriculum, a wise selection of 
material becomes absolutely necessary. History is 
the memory of the race, but like the individual 
memory, there is an enormous amount of its details 
which are forgotten or confused and are not worth 
recalling. So in the memory of the human race there 
should survive only the important events which have 
determined the trend of its progress in civilization. 
The quarrels of nations are often of no more impor- 
tance than the street fights of boyhood, although the 
black eye may be remembered a long time after it 
has whitened. Schopenhauer declares that he knows 
no finer objection to the value of all historical study 
than the question, " If I had lived before all these 
things happened, then would I have been necessarily 
any the less wise? " If we should sift our histories 
according to this question, their volume would very 



138 A VALIANT WOMAN 

sensibly decrease. The essential thing in history is 
not the rise and fall of nations, but the growth and 
development of ideas, — the long struggle of the in- 
telligence to adapt itself to new conditions, the trans- 
formation of the brute instincts of egotism into the 
highest social virtues: justice, courage, honor, truth, 
and unselfish compassion. This is the history of the 
race as it deserves to be remembered, and to be 
taught. This story is often summed up in the lives 
of heroes, and many thoughtful writers, Carlyle for 
example, have interpreted history as the biography 
of great men. The most eminent example of this 
interpretation is Plutarch's Lives, and so admirable 
a picture of the ancients do they give us, that a ju- 
dicious reading of them is infinitely more valuable 
£han the courses in ancient history offered by the pub- 
he schools; for it is not, I repeat, the record of bat- 
tles, the succession of kings, the recording of dates 
that make the study of history worth while; we can 
very well dispense with all that, and be none the 
poorer in wisdom. It is the philosophy of life which 
history should teach us to make it of any value to 
us. Then, too, a wise skepticism should accompany 
the study of history as well as the study of science. 
." You love truth," writes Voltaire to Mme. du Def- 
fand, " but let him catch it who can. I have 
searched for it all my life without finding it. I have 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 139 

perceived only some glimmers which have been mis- 
taken for it. That is why I have always preferred 
sentiment to reason." 

Whether or not the preference be wise depends 
upon the outcome. The best part of life is unmis- 
takably made up of illusions, and he who cannot lose 
his illusions without deep suffering and without losing 
his power to form just and right judgments, — he to 
whom they are the compass which directs his life and 
without which he is lost, had much better keep them 
till they naturally wear themselves out. I once heard 
a very clever man say that when, as a child, he was 
abruptly told that there is no Santa Claus, he was 
so deeply disturbed that he immediately lost his faith 
in God, heaven, and hell, thinking that they, too, were 
fictions of grown-up people to give authority to their 
wishes ; and he suffered so intensely over his loss of 
faith that he doubted if he had ever really recovered 
from the shock. There are no severer judges than 
the young, or than women to whom the broad ex- 
periences of life are wanting, and great care should 
be taken not to shock them into hardness and cru- 
elty of judgment. For this reason it is extremely 
unwise to reveal too early biographical or historical 
details which tend to degrade an eminent man in the 
eyes of the student. It is not with his faults as an 
erring human creature that the student is at all con- 



140 A VALIANT WOMAN 

cerned: it is with his services to humanity as a doer 
of great deeds and a thinker of great thoughts. I 
have heard a young girl declare emphatically that 
Benjamin Franklin could not possibly be a great man 
because he broke a youthful engagement ; and another 
one, reading in her biographical introduction to the 
Ancient Mariner that Coleridge was addicted to 
the opium habit, and lived apart from his family the 
greater part of his life, exclaimed bitterly : " He 
ought to have been hung." It was impossible to rea- 
son her out of this opinion, and if it had been possi- 
ble, there would have resulted a laxity of moral judg- 
ment widely different from the broad, safe tolerance 
of mature experience, — a laxity that would have 
subtly corrupted her rather than broadened and soft- 
ened her. The mature grain needs to soften in the 
moisture of the earth before it can sprout into the 
living plant, but the unripe grain will only rot in 
this moisture. This is a point which cannot be too 
strongly insisted upon in this age of ours whose tend- 
ency is to strip the veils from everything, under 
the cry, the truth can do no harm. 

Therefore, the wise teacher will not conceal the 
fact that, just as hypothesis plays a great part in 
science, so temperament, imagination, prejudice, su- 
perstition, play a great part in the writing of his- 
tory, and truth is known approximately and relatively 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 141 

rather than absolutely ; but he will not dwell too much 
upon this negative side, but will illuminate par- 
ticularly the encouraging and optimistic aspect of 
human life. Whenever a great deed has incarnated a 
noble thought, he is there to mark it, and pass on its 
influence to another generation. But he is there, too, 
to note the falsity of certain ever recurrent ideas 
which result in dreams of impossible states of so- 
ciety, where, instead of the lion's lying down with 
the lamb, there will be no lions, but all lambs, because 
nature never intended there should be lions but only 
lambs, the lions having made themselves lions out 
of lambs, by a superior course of fattening on other 
lambs ! 

To most immature minds, novelty is the best rec- 
ommendation for the acceptance of an idea, and the 
student's attention should be called to the fact that 
the fundamental ideas of communism and socialism 
are as old as tyranny and poverty, or any other of 
the countless forms of socal oppression and misery 
by which the natural inequalities among man manifest 
themselves. The exodus of the Jews under the 
guidance of Moses, the revolution in Syracuse led by 
Agathocles, the laws of Lycurgus, the institutions of 
Solon, the secession of the plebeians in Rome, the 
insurrection of the gladiators, the revolt of the 
Gracchi, Catiline's conspiracy, the reforms of Dm- 



142 A VALIANT WOMAN 

sus, Wat Tylers rebellion, Jack Cade's sedition, the 
rise of the English Commonwealth, the French Revo- 
lution, are all more or less salient crises in history 
that have ot*owii out of sincere and well-meant or 
ambitious and self-seeking efforts to redress abuses 
or to establish social equahtj r contrary to nature's 
express decree of inequality among men. These fun- 
damental ideas in various forms have found their way 
into literature, from Plato's Republic to More's Uto- 
pia and Bellamy's Looking Backward, not to speak 
of the Fouriers and Proudhons who have attempted 
to realize their ideals. The realization of them, fre- 
quently attempted, from the Spartan commonwealth 
to the Brook Farm idyll, has never been permanent, 
for the simple fact that their fundamental principles 
are false. But a bursted bubble is no guarantee that 
bubbles will never be blown again. They will be 
blown to the end of time, wherever there is plenty of 
air and plenty of soapsuds ; and the airier they are, the 
more brilliantly will they catch the light and break 
it into rainbow hues to charm the eye. It cannot 
be said that the present-day bubbles of the Bcbei type 
are particularly airy. There is too much soapsuds 
clinging to them. They do not free themselves well 
from Bebel's clay pipe. One part of his theory for- 
gets the other. In reading his Fran und der Sozialis- 
mus y we are constantly reminded of that admirable 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 143 

dialogue in the Tempest in which the exquisite com- 
mon sense of Shakespeare has summed up for all time 
the absurdities of Utopianism: 

Gonzalo. Had I plantation of this isle, my lord — 

Antonio. He'd sow it with nettle seed. 

Sebastian. Or docks or mallows. 

Gonzalo. And were the king on't, what would I do? 

Sebastian. 'Scape getting drunk for want of wine. 

Gonzalo. I would by contraries 

Execute all things: for no kind of traffic 
Would I admit; no name of magistrate; 
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, 
And use of service, none; contract, succession, 
Bourn, bound of land, tithe, vineyard, none; 
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil. 
No occupation, all men idle, all; 
And women too, but innocent and pure; 
No sovereignty — 

Sebastian. Yet he would be king on't. 

Antonio. The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the 
beginning. 

Gonzalo. All things in common; nature should produce 
Without sweat or endeavor; treason, felony, 
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine 
Would not have, but nature should bring forth 
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, 
To feed my innocent people. 

Sebastian. No marrying among his subjects? 

Antonio. None, man; all idle; whores and knaves. 

In the same deliciously naive manner would Bebel 
feed his innocent people, after practically putting 
labor out of the world, by exacting the minimum of 
it from each individual, and would preserve virtue by 



144 A VALIANT WOMAN 

annihilating innocence and restoring the lawlessness 
of savagery. To the socialist of the Bebel type, lib- 
erty, like charity, covers a multitude of sins ; nay, it 
quite wipes them out by laws forming them into vir- 
tues. The caprices, irregularities, and perversions of 
artificially and morbidly stimulated appetites are set 
down as the inexorable demands of nature, the neg- 
lect of which is criminal. 

Though condemning such opinions, I would say 
that an enlightened socialism aiming at a redress of 
real abuses, while at the same time admitting duty 
and law on its program, instead of individual 
caprice as the guide to action, is undoubtedly a step 
forward in civilization. The brutal egotism of the 
money-making machine which crushes the poor and 
helpless in its path is the abomination of modern so- 
ciety. It is the most vulgar and cruel of all tyran- 
nies, and the growing general sense of its injustice 
and hideous egotism prophesies its downfall. There- 
fore, there may come a time when the sentiment of 
altruism will be so generally vivid that to be a mil- 
lionaire in the presence of widespread human suf- 
fering will be to brand one's self as an atavistic, 
cold, cruel self-seeker, indifferent to others, bent only 
on grasping greedily at whatever is in reach. There 
may come a time when municipal and state owner- 
ship of all great enterprises affecting the public 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 145 

welfare will put it out of the power of a few to 
profit at the expense of the many, and the words 
monopoly and trust will be obsolete, belonging only 
to the pages of the history of commercialism. 
There may come a time when the sentiment of a 
common humanity will not be limited by national 
boundaries, and war will cease and free trade be uni- 
versally established. There may come a time when 
intelligence will be more widely esteemed than money 
or caste, and when intellect in a woman will no- 
where be regarded as an impertinent infringement 
on the. especial privilege of man; and when, in con- 
sequence, she herself will think more of her heart 
and mind than of the transitory charms of her face 
and the adornment of her body. The time may come 
too, when she will everywhere find the name of her 
sex no longer in the list with " paupers, insane, and 
idiots " ; and when the right of suffrage, and the 
privilege of choosing her life work, will be granted 
to her without any hint of criticism. There may 
come the time when the workman will take pride in 
his work and will not wish to exact for it more than 
it is worth, and will have the desire, as well as the 
leisure, for a certain degree of culture. There may 
come a time when the ministers of public instruction 
will prefer the finest teachers to costly buildings and 
magnificently equipped laboratories, and when teach- 



146 A VALIANT WOMAN 

ers themselves will prefer in the young, thoroughness 
in a few essential subjects to the satisfied ignorance 
and inflated egotism which is the result of a superficial 
skimming of a great number of them. There may 
come a time when man, having outgrown the current 
idea that he is an irresponsible victim of environment 
and heredity, will take heart again and restore duty, 
ideality, self-control, and ceaseless effort to the pro- 
gram of his life, from which it is the fashion now 
to exclude them. In that case there will come again, 
and blessed be its coming ! a time when old age will be 
once more venerable, because it will have behind it 
a youth and maturity of lofty effort and manly self- 
control. There may come a time when a life of idle- 
ness and pleasure will be generally regarded as a kind 
of moral and mental suicide, and a man will prefer 
with Cato to study Greek at eighty, to dying of pare- 
sis at forty. 

These are all fine possibilities, not so near realiza- 
tion, perhaps, as we might wish them, but still so far 
from being visionary and fantastic that every lover of 
his kind might strive to the utmost in the direction 
of them without fear of wasting his efforts at baying 
the moon. But of a surety, there will never come a 
time when all men will be mentally, morally, and 
physically equal; when poverty and crime will cease 
to exist; when the earth will bring forth her fatness 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 147 

without labor; when forests will be felled and cities 
built by touching an electric button ; when evil will 
be eliminated by calling it good; when the sweet and 
beautiful sentiment of the family will be replaced by 
the sentiment of the race, and the home will be lost in 
the phalanstery ; when progress towards differentia- 
tion in the form of individuality will cease, and retro- 
gression bring about the primitive condition of social 
herds ; when law will be an anachronism, because men 
will have become angels and need it no longer. It 
would seem that the French Revolution might have 
taught the world once for all the inexorable truth of 
these facts. Here was a colossal attempt to wipe out 
all natural as well as arbitrary distinctions of birth, 
to annihilate the mine and thine, to level mercilessly 
the crown with the hoe, and even to grind it into 
powder ; but nature made haste to give birth to a king, 
and the crown was restored to fit the head of Na- 
poleon. 

Of all human utterances there is none so false, fool- 
ish, and misleading as that of the natural equality of 
men. Men are not born equal any more than the 
stars are created of equal size and brillianc}^. The 
socialists of the Bebel type teach that inequality 
springs from the unequal division of external posses- 
sions, and that poverty, vice, and crime are the results 
of these unequal social conditions ; or, to put it in 



148 A VALIANT WOMAN 

more unequivocal terms, they teach that a pygmy on 
horseback is the same size as a giant on horseback, 
provided he is equally well mounted. Ergo, it is the 
horse and his trappings that make the man. Now if 
the pygmy has no means of getting so good a horse 
as the giant, he naturally would become a criminal 
in his desires and efforts to get one. It is the want 
of a horse that makes him a pygmy and a criminal. 
Absurd as appears this principle of determining a 
man's value by his worldly possessions in a concrete 
example like the one just given, it is more generally 
prevalent than we suppose. To be rich, to dress well, 
to spend money freely, to drive fast horses, or to own 
an automobile are the popular methods of determin- 
ing a man's value from the so-called upper classes 
down to the very lowest dregs of it. Margaret Fuller 
speaks of a woman sunk to the lowest depths of 
infamy, " who seemed to think she had never been 
wholly lost, * for,' said she, 6 I would always have 
good underclothes.' " 

We should hardly expect to find this principle of 
clothes philosophy the basis of a serious program 
of social regeneration, but it is with us now. It ar- 
gues a blind acquiescence in a popular fallacy which 
no matter how widespread will never do any respect- 
able amount of regenerating. You may scour the 
outside of the platter till it shines again and replate 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 149 

il with all the gold you choose, but until you clean 
l he inside of it, il will never be a lit receptacle for 
wholesome food. So far IS it from being true that 
social conditions breed inequality, that the stale itself 
lias arisen out of this very inequality. It meant 
originally the dominion of the strong over the weak, 
and only incidentally the protection of the latter by 

the former. The first man who carried his grievances 
to another and begged his advice and assistance in se- 
curing just ice laid the foundation and proved the ne- 
cessity of a slate. The point is that he was power- 
Less and another man strong, and he has an instinctive 
feeling that might does not make right. The state 
exists to affirm the principle of mutual dependence, 
and it carries out its protection of the weak to such 
lengths of sympathetic tolerance that in certain direc- 
tions it is beginning to excite the disapproval of think- 
ers like Haeckel, who counsels, instead of the building 
of asj lums, the chloroforming of idiots and the incura- 
bly insane, as well as of those hopeless invalids whose 
sufferings make life a torture to them and who desire 
to be rid of il. 

The stale abounds in charities of every description; 
it is by no means the shield of the rich or their held for 
exploitation, as it has so often been called. That 
abuses also abound and that justice is nol always in- 
corruptible is also an undoubted fact, but this is due 



ISO A VALIANT WOMAN 

to the imperfections of human nature. " Our social 
varnish," says Le Dantec, " is superficial ; the cave 
man remains almost intact underneath it. ■ The cave 
man clothed himself formerly in a moral robe which 
has fallen upon some of his descendants to the point 
of making them models of the social individual. But 
Francis of Assisi and Vincent de Paul are exceptions ; 
the majority of men have remained troglodytes. They 
will still remain troglodytes, in spite of the new 
clothes which science is manufacturing for them." 

In short, man is a man and not an angel; but so- 
cialists and communists and anarchists and nihilists 
affirm that under different social conditions, where 
there would be no capitalists, no private ownership 
of land, and no laws, he would be an angel. They 
have forgotten the cave man who had none of these 
things and probably ate his fellow-man raw. 

" Economic conditions," says Lombroso 1 , " have, in 
general, nothing to do with crime. In opposition to 
the sentimental belief of socialists that beautiful sur- 
roundings and relief from grinding want will produce 
moral habits, may be adduced this remarkable fact: 
the village of Artena in the Roman province is notori- 
ous as one of the veritable seats of crime. Situated 
on the summit of a hill in the midst of a green, fertile 
country, with the mildest of climates, this district, 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 151 

where poverty is unknown, ought to be one of the hap- 
piest and most honorable. On the contrary, it has 
an infamous celebrity, and in the neighborhood its in- 
habitants are considered as robbers, brigands, and 
assassins. This celebrity does not date from yester- 
day. In the Italian chronicles of the middle ages, the 
name of Artena is often found, and its history may be 
summed up as a history of crimes. It might be said 
that brigandage, which to-day is dead everywhere 
else, has taken refuge in this little country, gaining 
in intensity what it has lost in extent. ... A su- 
perficial observer would maintain that famine or scar- 
city of food is one of the most powerful causes of 
revolt or revolution. So all socialists seem to think, 
since they attribute the guilt of every crime to envi- 
ronment. But instead of that, famine alone produces 
neither revolution nor revolt. It only impels emi- 
gration to-day, as it did in the middle ages, when it 
lent an impulse to the Crusades. . . . Therefore it is 
not true that in extreme povert}*- all would become Jean 
Valjeans; for reality, more moral and more consoling 
than certain romancers, offers us the example of many 
obscure martyrs who prefer death to the abdication 
of their honor. It is not true that in extreme poverty 
the multitude always becomes rebellious. It is a vul- 
gar prejudice that poverty and wretchedness are the 
cause of many crimes. It is a scientific prejudice 



152 A VALIANT WOMAN 

of an opposite character to attribute to genius almost 
no influence upon human events." 

Perhaps no word in modern scientific use has been 
so much abused as the word " environment " ; and no 
one has abused it more than the man who throws his 
conscience overboard with the exultant cry : " I am 
the son of my father and mother and all their ances- 
try, the passive creature of environment and heredity. 
Lay all my sins to them and the apes of the primeval 
forests." Comforting as this doctrine may be, it is 
not true. A man is not wholly the creature of en- 
vironment and heredity. With him there came an en- 
tirely new force into the world which we call individ- 
uality. If environment and heredity were entirely 
the creators of man, all progress, all individual differ- 
ences of capacity and power of assimilation would be 
impossible under the continuance of the same environ- 
ment and parentage. But man does progress, he does 
show various degrees of enlightenment and of physical 
power under exactly the same conditions. In the 
same forests where his ancestors herded as savages or 
chattered in the branches as apes, if you will, he has 
built cities, laid out vast parks, and stretched wires to 
carry his thought from shore to shore. We should 
be much nearer the truth in saying that man is the cre- 
ator and not the creature of his environment. The 
truth is that he is both influenced by it and influences 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 153 

it, and the measure of the preponderance of either 
influence is determined by his intellect. It is there- 
fore unpardonable stupidity in a man to declare him- 
self the helpless creature of social environment. 

Darwin himself, in later years, saw the error into 
which he had fallen in attributing too much influence 
to climatic conditions, and humorously said of it: 
66 It has taken me many years to disabuse my mind 
of the too great importance of climate — its im- 
portant influence being so conspicuous, while that 
of struggle between creature and creature is so hid- 
den — that I am inclined to swear at the North Pole, 
and, as Sydney Smith said, to speak disrespectfully 
of the Equator." 

It will take us, also, many years to escape the fas- 
cination of so easy an explanation of differences be- 
tween man and man, as that which we sum up in the 
word " environment." Because a moth on the bark 
of a tree finds its security in its bark-colored wings, 
because the lizard in the sand has a yellowish hue, 
and the polar bear is white, we straightway conclude 
that man, too, finds the color of his fate and his char- 
acter in the hues of his surroundings ; and we formu- 
late a scientific Calvinism of predestination as hard 
and tight as the dogmas of its religious prototype. 
We see that the larva of a working bee, if its cell is 
enlarged and it is fed in a peculiar way, develops into 



154 A VALIANT WOMAN 

a queen bee, and forming an analogy to fit human 
experience, we make a law of a figure of speech, and 
seriously think that if we enlarge our houses and 
feed better, we shall develop a royal type of humanity. 
But it is intelligence, not function, that makes the su- 
periority of man, and human intelligence is not the 
play of so simple a mechanism. Its laws elude us; 
when we think we have grasped them, nature mocks 
us with their violation, and we must either give them 
up, or patch up the rags of them as best we can. 

The influence of environment, when it is not 
markedly different enough to produce racial types, is 
purely external, and the essential elements of charac- 
ter remain the same. A man's accent may be that of 
his parish, his table manners may not pass muster at 
Paris or London,, his trousers may fit his legs closely 
in one province, and bag in another, but the deep 
underlying ego that makes the man what he really is, 
was born with him, and Burns at the plow tail is as 
much of a poet as Byron in the House of Lords. 
The vast majority of our geniuses and men and 
women of note came from the huts and the cottages, 
not from the mansions and palaces. It would seem as 
if Nature delighted to show how she scorns all artifi- 
cial coddling when she proposes to send a great man 
into the world. She makes no bed of roses, she 
smooths no paths for him, she does not feed him on 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 155 

ambrosia and nectar, she does not fill his ears with ap- 
plause. On the contrary, not luxury and ease, but 
toil and care, are waiting for him, and the poor man's 
meager fare, and the chill isolation which a lofty ideal 
always creates for itself. Yet, our ingenious social- 
ists propose to substitute a new cushioned method for 
Nature's austere one. They will hatch geniuses by 
the thousand in their new social incubator. They 
think that geniuses, inventors, and artists can be made 
to order out of any sort of human material ; but the 
brain of man is not analogous to the liver of a Stras- 
burg goose, and cannot be enlarged by any artificial 
process of cramming. AH that education, training, 
fortunate environment can do, is to develop it favor- 
ably to its utmost possibility. It cannot be remade 
into something different and of superior quality, any 
more than by careful cultivation of the wild rose we 
can have anything more than the most beautiful rose 
possible. By no process of culture, by no change of 
environment, can it be transformed into a lily. No 
— we can hatch out chickens in an incubator, but we 
must leave the laying of the eggs to the hen. 

Truly, therefore, history has no more profitable 
lesson to teach the restless, discontented spirit of our 
age than the lesson of the natural inequality of men, 
and their consequent relations to each other, along 
with that other great truth, that the story of civiliza- 



156 A VALIANT WOMAN 

tion is the story of a struggle towards the light, often 
relentless and cruel, but never advanced through sloth 
and ease. Therefore we can never hope to rid our- 
selves of the pain and weariness of toil, and must 
learn to face pain with courage and work with love. 
The laborer's real recompense for his toil is the pride 
and joy he feels in its results. I shall never forget 
how the first conception of that joy came to me some 
years ago in Venice. I had started out to find St. 
Mark's Square^ the first evening of my arrival, and 
not knowing the way, I inquired of a workman who 
was going home with his dinner pail in his hand. He 
offered to accompany me, saying that his way led 
through the square. As we were passing through 
one of the narrow streets, he stopped suddenly and 
said, with a fine accent of pride in his voice and a 
sudden light in his face, as he sounded his foot on the 
pavement : " There's a bit of my work. I helped lay 
that pavement." And I knew he was right to feel 
proud that by his labor we could walk dry-shod over 
what had once been a slimy water way. 

Passing through the square, the next day, I heard 
what I thought to be a chant of monks from St. 
Mark's, but on approaching the inclosed space where 
the new bell tower was going up, I recognized that it 
came from the workmen inside. How richly the deep, 
sonorous voices rang out on the air [ A genuine song 



SCIENCE AND HISTORY 157 

of labor, a glorious chant rising and falling in ex- 
quisite cadence, as if work were a joy supreme, and 
every brick and stone of the rising campanile must 
swing itself to position in a burst of music! Such 
music is far more touching than any chant of idle 
monks in their dim, cool cloisters, forever secure from 
the heat and fret and toil of the world. Encourag- 
ing and helpful, too, as well as touching, was this 
song of labor in these days when the primal curse that 
rests upon the fields that he must till is oftener on his 
lips than the song of joy and thankfulness that he 
can work ; that it is given to him to drain poisonous 
marshes and cover them with rippling fields of grain ; 
to fell forests and build cities ; to subdue the ocean 
and make of its trackless waters the highway of the 
nations ; to make the rough stones of the quarry obey 
his fancy, and mount in colossal wall, or airy turret 
and spire, or unfold in lovely blossom and lace-like 
tracery, or rise re-created in his own image with a 
beauty that gladdens the ages. Has he not reason to 
be glad in his work and proud of it? Shall he not 
sing at his labor? Is it better to encourage that 
song, or to silence it, or change it into lament and 
curses, by preaching revolt and discontent, and turn- 
ing the eyes toward a mirage of impossible bliss? 



CHAPTER V 

ETHICAL TEACHING 

TT7ITH the ethical question left out, public 
" * school education is an air plant that may some- 
times take the brilliant form of an orchid, but will 
never produce a fruit-bearing tree ; and humanity is 
in greater need of fruits than orchids. 

It is daily asserted that our age is suffering from 
the collapse of religious faith, and it is assumed that 
morality is necessarily bound up with the acceptance 
of a faith which assigns a reason for good behavior in 
the rewards or punishments of a future life. 

Perhaps no more immoral or dangerous idea than 
this of the necessary interdependence of religion and 
morality could be promulgated; although it is true 
that a morality based upon a belief in a scheme of fu- 
ture rewards and punishment must give way with a 
loss of this belief. But the fact only proves the in- 
feriority and worthlessness of a morality based upon 
such a belief, instead of resting upon the invincible 
principle of a real love of right for itself alone. Add 
to this moral bewilderment that nostalgia of the soul 
which has lost its ideal, its meaning of life — which 

158 



ETHICAL TEACHING 159 

was only more life, endless life — and we have that 
weariness and despair so eloquently expressed by Al- 
fred de Musset in his passionate reproach to the great 
poets who preceded him, — Byron and Goethe. 

" Forgive me, O great poets ! You who are now 
but a handful of ashes under the sod! Forgive me! 
You are demigods and I am only a suffering child. 
But in writing this, I cannot help cursing you. Why 
did you not sing of the perfume of flowers, the voices 
of nature, hope and love, the vine and the sunlight, 
the blue sky and beauty? Undoubtedly, you under- 
stood life, and undoubtedly, you suffered; the world 
was crumbling around you; you wept on its ruins. 
You despaired: the women you loved had betrayed 
you; your friends had slandered you; your fellow- 
countrymen misunderstood you; your heart was 
empty ; death was in your eyes, and you were colossal 
monuments of grief. 

" But tell me, noble Goethe, was there no longer a 
comforting voice in the religious murmur of the old 
forests of Germany? You for whom beautiful po- 
etry was the sister of science, could not they both find 
in immortal nature a salutary balm for the heart of 
their favorite ? You who were a pantheist, an antique 
poet of Greece, a lover of sacred forms, could not you 
put a little honey into those beautiful vases which 
you so well knew how to make? You who had but 



1 60 A VALIANT WOMAN 

to smile and let the bees come to your lips ? And you 3 
Byron, had not you near you at Ravenna under the 
orange groves of Italy, under your blue Venetian sky, 
near your dear Adriatic, had not you the woman 
whom you loved so well? 

" O God ! I who speak to you am nothing but a 
feeble child! Perhaps I have known evils which 
you have not suffered, and yet, I believe in hope, — 
and yet, I bless God ! " 

Perhaps our children will utter the same reproach 
to us in asking these solemn questions: Could not 
you have taught us that duty is nobler than pleasure ? 
When science shut out heaven from the sky, and God 
out of the universe, could not you have taught us that 
it set no limit to the progress of intelligence nor wiped 
out the boundary line between right and wrong, but 
defined right in terms of progress in life, and light, 
and higher joy, and evil in terms of retrogression and 
ruin? Did you teach us that to ask for the meaning 
of life in terms of length and not breadth is to be ig- 
noble, and that breadth of life comes from the largest 
sympathy with all life? Could not you have taught us 
to respect work, independent of play, and fitted us to 
carry its burdens without weariness and disgust? 
Was it impossible to show us what is dignified and ven- 
erable in age, because the fear of it was in your own 
hearts, and you felt that you must apologize for your 



ETHICAL TEACHING 161 

years and travesty youth to make yourselves seem to 
be one of us ? Did you fill us with the hatred of 
shams, with the horror of passing ourselves off for 
more than we were worth ? Did you inspire us with 
the love of truth above all things, and with fearlessness 
in the presence of it? Did you teach us the beauty 
of self-control, of loyalty, of trustworthiness, sym- 
pathy, obedience to superiors, of courage in the pres- 
ence of difficulty and danger? Did you show us how 
poor a thing it is to struggle for wealth and distinction 
at the cost of health, honor, intelligence, and free- 
dom? Did you free us from superstition only to 
give us over to despair or indifference when con- 
fronted with great moral problems? Did you break 
our will, or weaken it, by reasoning us into believing 
that we had no will at all, but were the playthings of 
destiny ? 

It would be difficult to give a satisfactory answer 
to these questions, and that is why there is at present 
so general an awakening of the professional con- 
science on the subject of ethics. And there has been 
a very general hurrying and scurrying to the breach 
with all sorts of weapons of defense, with the result 
that we have lecture-ethics, playground ethics, ex- 
perimental ethics, stereopticon-views ethics, anatom- 
ical ethics, and in the midst of it all have forgotten 
the really essential fact so admirably summed up in 



1 62 A VALIANT WOMAN 

the telling sentence which Richter quotes in Levana 
from a Chinese author : " Not the cry, but the rising 
of a wild duck impels the flock to follow him in up- 
ward flight." 

The leaven of the larger life must be in us, be- 
fore we can start it to fermenting in the young en- 
trusted to our care. " The virtue of the prince," 
says Confucius, " is like unto wind, that of the peo- 
ple like unto grass ; for it is the nature of grass to 
bend when the wind blows upon it." 

When I look back to the influence of the valiant 
woman to whose memory these pages are written, I see 
in her this prince-like power of inspiration. It was 
an influence of character and not of set lessons which 
she wielded. She was what she would have us be. 
She inspired us with an intense respect which never 
lessened even when it overflowed into deep love. It 
was due, I think, to an admirable reticence in her 
which had nothing severe or repellent in it, and yet 
held us in check. We felt her deep, sincere affec- 
tion, although she never revealed it in the cheap shop- 
girl epithet, " dear/ 9 applied indiscriminately to 
everybody. Children need love, but they need it 
steeled with firmness. There is a wholesome, vigor- 
ous, bracing love, not afraid to be harsh at times, 
if necessary, based first of all upon the wish to 
ennoble and bless the object loved. Then there is a 



ETHICAL TEACHING 163 

weak, sloppy, " my deary," sugary sort of affection, 
not really deserving the name of love, which makes 
all sorts of concessions to weakness, and it is based 
upon vanity and sloth of mind, the desire to please 
and to be pleasing without effort. Nothing is more 
pernicious than an affection of this kind. It is the 
love of weak, characterless mothers and weak, char- 
acterless teachers. It is so sweet that it is sticky, 
and woe to the child that it smears ! He grows cruel 
and insolent under it, arrogantly confident, disdain- 
fully ungrateful, contemptuous of the weakness that 
pets him. 

Kraft-Ebing declares that bad education, laying 
the foundation for hysteria, hypochondria, or drunk- 
enness, may be the result first of " too harsh treat- 
ment of an extremely impressionable child's nature; 
or secondly, of a too indulgent education that de- 
nies nothing, and excuses all unbridled passions, ob- 
stinacy, and want of self-control. Nothing strong 
and energetic ever comes from mother's pets. Social 
life demands self-control, subordination to the ma- 
jority, strength of opposition to the storms of life, 
and resignation. Where these are wanting, bitter- 
ness and pain are not spared; thirdly, the too early 
awakening of the intellectual power at the expense of 
the feelings and the soundness of the body." 

In that wise book full of helpful suggestions to 



1 64 A VALIANT WOMAN 

teachers, II romanzo d'un maestro, Edmondo de Ami- 
cis makes an experienced teacher say to a young 
schoolmaster who has failed in discipline: 

" I know the adoration of childhood that you 
have, and I esteem it as a treasure of force in a 
teacher; but the master must hide it. By an in- 
stinctive love of domination, the child imagines for 
himself a foundation of right in every concession that 
is made to him, and he uses it as a pretext for re- 
bellion. He must not be governed by threats and 
chastisement, nor by exhortations, but by commands ; 
and under all this, he must feel the affection that 
moderates, compensates, consoles, but cautiously, at 
opportune moments, showing like a ray of light in 
the midst of clouds. The maxim of a certain gen- 
eral is good for children as it is for soldiers : ' Never 
threaten, never compromise.' 

" Believe me, I commenced like you, and I had to 
change. I have doubted myself. There is con- 
cealed in me a man who loves children, who suffers 
when they suffer, and is charmed with their grace 
and their naivete, who caresses them in his thoughts 
and pardons them quickly. But there is another I, 
— a man, external only, who interposes himself be- 
tween the children and the real man, and is a very 
different sort of man ; — severe, sparing of praise, 



ETHICAL TEACHING 165 

harsh sometimes, but always just. Try to do the 
same thing." 

I do not think our teacher's attitude to us was 
adopted in this deliberate way. I think her reticence 
was natural. It is my experience that the most ex- 
quisite natures are apt to conceal their tenderness 
through an instinct of self-preservation, and that 
their apparent equilibrium is a mask which they wear 
to prevent their being too frequently wounded. On 
the other hand, great suavity and a fluent expression 
of emotion is a natural accompaniment of coldness 
and hypocrisy. The child's instinct very rarely 
leads him astray in this matter, and his deepest love 
and respect flow towards the hidden sources of ten- 
derness. We felt our teacher's perfect justness, 
when we heard her praise and blame fall where they 
were deserved. She never nagged us ; she never 
argued with us. She gave her commands without 
any unnecessary assumption of authority, and never 
excused the disobedience of them. She had a singu- 
lar flexibility that made her incapable of resentment 
or sulkiness. It seemed as if every day were a new 
beginning, with the faults and follies of the day pre- 
ceding canceled from her memory. Her love of 
truth was very remarkable, and she often illustrated 
its beauty and impressiveness with a belief that it 



1 66 A VALIANT WOMAN 

is the basis of honesty and trustworthiness, — the 
backbone of character. She gave us an example of 
the rare courage that dares to be true to itself in 
little as well as in great things. She showed it to 
us in her contempt of the caprices of fashion, as 
well as her indifference to mere forms of opinion 
with no kernel in them. She never talked for mere 
effect. When she spoke, she had something to say; 
therefore she held our attention. She was generous 
in the noblest way ; she gave herself and her time 
to us, out of school as well as in the class room. No 
one left her, even after a short conversation, with- 
out feeling in some way strengthened and exhilarated. 
And the reason of it was that she had high intellectual 
vigor combined with the most perfect common sense. 
Outside of genius, I believe this combination to be 
rare, and it is not always found in genius. Learn- 
ing has little part in this vigor. An ass drawing 
a cart-load of books after him is no less an ass be- 
cause the cart is loaded with books instead of gravel. 
It is nature that decrees that one man shall be su- 
perior to another, and nature had decreed that her 
intellect should neither be clogged by pedantry nor 
vitiated by a romantic or sentimental twist. For 
this reason she was a perfect antidote to the cheap 
sentimentality that despises to-day because it is not 
to-morrow, and the place where it lives because it 



ETHICAL TEACHING 167 

is not some other place, and the reality it touches 
because it is not woven of the cobwebs and rainbows 
of dreams. Her sane, clear outlook on life made 
her an incomparable guide to the young, and set a 
high ethical standard before them whose principles 
were: honor and obedience where honor and obe- 
dience are due, truth, justice, honesty, sympathy, 
self-respect, self-control, and love of work. These 
ethical principles are the inheritance of the most ad- 
vanced races of humanity, and are not necessarily 
bound up with any particular religious faith; and 
the assertion that they are, is one of those discour- 
aging claims of a too zealous faith, that require re- 
peated denial. Herbert Spencer felt this when he 
wrote his Data of Ethics, and anticipated the criti- 
cism of those who " far from rejoicing that ethical 
principles otherwise derived by them, coincide with 
ethical principles scientifically derived, are offended 
by the coincidence " ; and the offense continues to 
show itself in the feeling of contempt with which 
the religious man regards the morals of his philosoph- 
ical neighbor, although consistent with his own, ex- 
cept that they are unsustained by any hope of im- 
mortality. 

" These individuals are parasites," writes the 
French moralist, Legendre. " In the pagan world, 
parasites ate from the table of the nobles. In the 



168 A VALIANT WOMAN 

modern Christian world, there exist parasites of the 
morals of others." 

In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant replies 
to a similar assumption of superiority on the part 
of those who make happiness the aim of life but 
restrict happiness to intellectual pleasures, looking 
upon sensual pleasures as coarse and unworthy, by 
wisely observing that to those who need gold to 
spend, it is all one whether the gold be dug from the 
mountain or washed from the sand. The same meta- 
phor may be fitly applied to the pure gold of moral- 
ity. It is equally gold whether it be dug from the 
mountain or washed from the sand at its foot; 
whether it be rooted in fear and reverence of the un- 
known, or rooted more deeply still in the unconscious 
inherited instincts; just as health is health whether 
it result from a careful diet and a prescribed course 
of medicine, or be the natural outcome of well-bal- 
anced physical forces equal to the demands made 
upon them. The lily is rooted in mud, but there is 
not a trace of the mud in its pure white petals. So 
the curious philosopher may trace the purest altru- 
ism to its roots in crass egotism, but this flower of 
morality is no less beautiful and fragrant because of 
its origin. Nor are the golden precepts of the great 
moral geniuses of one race and age less noble and 
less valid than those of another race and age; and 



ETHICAL TEACHING 169 

the command, " What you would not wish done to 
yourself, do not unto others," was just as much the 
summary of a high morality when it fell from the 
lips of Confucius, as when it was uttered in a posi- 
tive form by Christ. It is a curious and narrow 
prejudice to look on it otherwise, and a singular arro- 
gance that says of the gift of life, that it is a mock- 
ery, a jest, to be wasted and spilled as we choose, 
if it be not endless ; and that morality is an idle word 
without a hell to enforce it or a heaven to reward 
it. Morality is life at its best and its highest. It 
is the health of the soul. It is the noblest expression 
of the instinct of self-preservation ; and, as such, be- 
comes the inheritance of the race, so that its dictates 
are felt as an infallible conscience, a categorical im- 
perative, the reason of which is no more to be ques- 
tioned than the instinct which holds us to life. It 
takes on, then, its beautiful finished form of right 
for the sake of right. It asks no reward; it is its 
own reward. Indeed, if the question of reward 
arises, it is felt as a reproach, a stain on the purity of 
the motive which alone is esteem for the law. Hence 
arise among all races those exquisite dicta of moral- 
ity which express the necessity of it, not because a 
reward or punishment is implied in it, but because 
it is an end in itself; because in the language of 
a Hindoo sage, " the existence of living beings is as 



i/o A VALIANT WOMAN 

fleeting as the moonbeams that tremble on the water, 
and knowing this, a man should ever act uprightly." 
He should love work, not because he shall prepare 
himself for the hereafter, but because " the night 
cometh, when no man can work." liuskin, who was 
not always tolerant towards skeptics, especially in 
his early years, is admirably just to them when he 
says in his preface to the Crown of Wild Olive: 

" A brave belief in life is indeed an enviable 
state of mind, but so far as I can discern, an un- 
usual one. I know few Christians so convinced of 
the splendors of the rooms in their Father's house 
as to be happier when their friends are called to those 
mansions than they would have been if the Queen 
had sent for them to live at court; nor has the 
Church's most ardent ' desire to depart and be with 
Christ ' ever cured it of the singular habit of putting 
on mourning for every person summoned to such de- 
parture. On the contrary, a brave belief in death 
has been assuredly held by many not ignoble persons, 
and it is a sign of the last depravity of the Church 
itself, when it assumes that such belief is inconsist- 
ent with cither purity of character or energy of hand. 
The shortness of life is not to any rational person 
a conclusive reason for wasting the space of it 
which may be granted him ; nor does the anticipa- 
tion of death to-morrow suggest to any one but a 



ETHICAL TEACHING 171 

drunkard the expediency of drunkenness to-day. To 
teach that there is no device in the grave may make 
the deviceless person more contented in his dullness ; 
but it will make the deviser only more earnest in 
devising; nor is human conduct likely in every case 
to be purer under the conviction that all its evil may 
in a moment be pardoned, and all its wrongdoing 
in a moment redeemed; and that the sigh of repent- 
ance, which purges the guilt of the past, will waft 
the soul into a felicity which forgets its pain, — than 
it may be under the sterner and to many not unwise 
minds more probable apprehension that ' what a man 
sowcth, that shall he also reap,' — or others reap when 
he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no more in 
darkness, but lies down therein." 

Ruskin is right. A belief in the transitorincss of 
life by no means implies to any really brave and 
thoughtful man the conviction that it is not worth 
having. He knows that if he have an eternity be- 
fore him, he can enjoy no more of it than what is 
bounded by the present, and his eager curiosity, his 
growing intelligence, supply him with so many ob- 
jects of interest and pleasure, his widening sym- 
pathies so broaden his feeling of life by allying him 
to all forms of it, that it never occurs to him to 
question its meaning apart from itself. It is itself 
an end, a meaning, and he rejoices in it as such, with 



172 A VALIANT WOMAN 

the great Goethe to whom " Das Zweck des Lebens 
ist das Lebcn selbst." But when the satiety of sen- 
sual pleasures has dulled the capacity for intellectual 
joy, and the thrill of health is gone, the useless ques- 
tion, What is the meaning of life? intrudes into the 
sick and weary heart and will not be silenced while 
it feebly beats. If the character be strong, and the 
intellect have a powerful bias toward the ideal, the 
question is put to rest by an ascetic faith. If 
the character be weak through excess of vanity, the 
question is silenced by unbridled sensuality. The 
one seeks his rest in the solitude of the mountain 
summits and quenches his thirst in their eternal 
snows. The other seeks it among swine, and slakes 
his thirst with their swill and wallows in their mire. 
Our century has given us two notable examples of 
these two types of mind in Leo Tolstoi and Oscar 
Wilde, — in the one, the beast in man wholly trampled 
under foot and dead ; in the other, the beast tri- 
umphant. 

In De Profundis, the most solemn warning ever 
uttered to an erring century, Oscar Wilde confesses, 
after summing up the advantages of his position, — 
genius, wealth, social station, the ear of the public: 
" Then came the turning point. I allowed myself 
to become enslaved by senseless sensuality and ease. 
I amused myself by being a flaneur, a dandy, and a 



ETHICAL TEACHING 173 

leader of fashion. I wasted my genius and found 
a strange pleasure in squandering the gift of eternal 
youth. I had become tired of dwelling on the 
heights, and descended by my own will into the 
depths. I eagerly sought new sensations and strange 
experiences. In the realm of thought, I delighted 
in being paradoxical; in the realm of passion, I be- 
came attracted by that which is perverse. Desire 
became a disease, a frenzy, or both. I had no re- 
gard for the lives of others. I satisfied my desires 
whenever it suited me, and passed on. I forgot that 
every act, even the most insignificant act of daily 
life, in some degree makes or unmakes the character; 
that every occurrence which transpires in the seclu- 
sion of the chamber will some day be proclaimed 
from the house-tops. I lost control over myself. I 
was no longer at the helm, and knew it not. I had 
become a slave to pleasure, . . . and hideous degra- 
dation was the result. One thing, only, is left to me, 
complete humility. 

• ••••• « 

" I hope that I may some day be able to say hon- 
estly and sincerely that my life had two turning 
points, — the first, when my father sent me to Ox- 
ford; the second, when society sent me to jail. I do 
not mean to say that this was the best thing that 
could have happened to me. I would rather put the 



174 A VALIANT WOMAN 

matter this way, and have it understood by others, 
that I was such a typical child of the times, that in 
my perversity I turned that which was good in my 
life to evil, and that which was evil to good. 



" Suffering and all its lessons — that is my new 
world. My former life was devoted to pleasure alone. 
To pain and care I gave a wide berth: they were 
not to my taste. I made it a habit not to pay the 
slightest attention to them, to look upon them as in- 
firmities. They had no place in the economy of my 
life, no place in my system of philosophy. 

" I now realize that suffering is the noblest emo- 
tion of which man is capable, — is, as it were, the 
type and touchstone of the highest art. . . . Sorrow 
or suffering is beyond comparison perfect truth." 

In calling himself " a typical child of the times," 
Oscar Wilde was right in so far as he represents the 
reaction against the acceptance of pain as a neces- 
sary element of human discipline, and against the 
solemn and restraining sentiment of responsibility 
which make the basis of Christian ethics. He repre- 
sents, also, the increasing feebleness of will in mod- 
ern man, which makes him indulgent, as Bourget 
observes, M towards the errors and faults of weakness, 



ETHICAL TEACHING 175 

excusing them as fatalities of impulse, of heredity, of 
temperament, excuses that would have been unintelli- 
gible to our forefathers." We give to the unvary- 
ing sequence of cause and effect the name of law, 
and we discover that it reigns everywhere, in the na- 
ture of man, as well as in the living and inert phe- 
nomena surrounding him. Consequently around this 
question whether the will of man is free or not, there 
has always been and always will be dissenting opin- 
ions, some holding it to be entirely free, others think- 
ing it entirely determined. The truth here, as 
elsewhere, seems to lie between the two extremes. 
Man is not wholly the product of his environment, or 
as George Eliot makes Mr. Lammeter say, " Breed is 
more than pasture." Nor is he entirely the creature 
of heredity. With every new being, there comes a 
new face into the world, though modeled on the old 
familiar type, — there comes also a new intellect with 
characteristics of its own. Man is free and not free, 
like a calf that is tethered to a stake. The calf is 
free the length of his rope, and man, too, is free the 
length of Ins rope — and the rope is not of the same 
length for every man. There are strong wills and 
weak wills ; but were all wills equally determined, the 
expression of any difference in them would be non- 
sense, for the difference would not exist. Man's will 
seems to be completely determined only when he 



176 A VALIANT WOMAN 

dreams, and his waking hours would mirror the same 
confusion and fatality, were the mind not controlled 
by the will. In short, if determinism means fatal- 
ism in the absolutely inflexible way that Calvinism 
does, it is contradicted Iry the uniform experience of 
the normal mind. " The worth of a man consists not 
in what he knows, but in how he wills," says Her- 
bart. The mind does not willingly resign the con- 
sciousness of responsibilit} 7 , and when it does we have 
the word insane to fit the case. On the other hand, 
if a certain degree of determinism did not direct the 
will, education, training, experience, environment, or 
whatever we call higher influences would be worse 
than useless. There must consequently be a misap- 
plication of certain scientific deductions, when the 
mind is reduced to a mere mechanism by them, and 
the truth must lie somewhere between the extremes 
of materialism and idealism. Therefore, it is safe 
to sa} r that the doctrine of irresponsibility has come 
in with the half understanding and misapplication 
of scientific truths, and must go out. again with a 
revival of common sense. If a man's ancestors and 
his environment are made the excuse for his crimes, 
we are as unable to help him as we are to straighten 
a crooked tree that has got its growth. But the 
really absurd part of the doctrine is, that after re- 
lieving a man of all responsibility with regard to his 



ETHICAL TEACHING 177 

own actions by shoving it back on his ancestors, we 
turn about when he is dead and make him responsible 
for his posterity. Better start the responsibility 
sooner and let it take care of his own life instead of 
si) if ting it on to him later when he is dead and gone. 
Besides, every decent man prefers to accept himself 
with all his faults and sins as a responsible creature, 
rather than attribute them to his father and mother. 
Such a doctrine leads directly to social anarchy and 
the increase of crime. Our much vaunted free coun- 
try, where more money is spent on education than 
in any other, leads the world in the commission of 
crime by a very heavy per cent. A weak sentimental- 
ity, the spread of the belief that either social condi- 
tions or pathological conditions, and not a man's own 
bad heart, are responsible for crime, has much to 
do with this state of affairs. Again, we must say, 
it is the inside of the platter that needs scouring. 
It cannot be kept clean by simply brushing off the 
table all around it. Nor can it be kept clean by 
changing the definition of clean, and insisting that 
it is sweet and pure when it is foul with rottenness. 

There is, at present, a widespread Rousseauish re- 
vival of sentimentality and of nature worship that 
threatens the revival of ancient phallic worship. 
As if we had not outgrown all that, just as we have 
outgrown our swaddling clothes and slavering bibs ! 



1 78 A VALIANT WOMAN 

As if civilization does not necessarily imply an oppo- 
sition to nature in many things, and does not mean to 

" Move upward, working out the beast 
And let the ape and tiger die." 

All this slimy sentimentality about a very simple 
and natural thing, around which a wise decency has 
heretofore thrown a becoming reticence, is the sure 
entrance on the downward path to the mire into 
which Oscar Wilde fell; and when a woman sets her- 
self up as a priestess of this phallic worship, it is 
well to pause a moment and deliberately face this 
new malady of erotic eruption, because only evil can 
come from ignoring it and letting it spread still 
farther. 

To do Ellen Key entire justice, she has no in- 
tention of opening the gates to the mire any more 
than Epicurus had any intentions of founding a 
philosophy of low, egotistic pleasure-seeking. The 
common mistake of a beautiful soul, and Ellen Key 
has a beautiful soul, is to believe generously in the 
entire beauty of all other souls. It is an exquisite 
illusion which brings great delight to the possessor; 
but like all other similar illusions it is founded upon 
an entire ignorance of human nature. Ellen Key 
sees all men and women through her own tempera- 
ment ; the keynote to her nature is motherhood. She 



ETHICAL TEACHING 179 

has the great, warm, forgiving, brooding, blind 
mother-heart ; and because the love that fills her heart 
is blind, and not beautifully keen-sighted, she would 
lead the world into a foul and stagnant ditch, while 
proclaiming it the fountain of Paradise. Mrs. Car- 
lyle used to say of Edward Irving, " Had he mar- 
ried me, there would have been no tongues," meaning 
that her own rare common sense would have kept his 
brilliant intellect sane. So we might say of Ellen 
Key: Had she ever married, or even, unmarried, 
could she have lived a few years in American board- 
ing-houses, with an ordinary gift of observation, she 
would not now be the priestess of the phallic cult 
with the gushing illusions of a budding schoolgirl 
of fifteen. And it is a significant hint of the un- 
quenchable youthfulness or rather childishness of the 
unobservant mind, that her poetical gush, due to en- 
tire ignorance of human nature, is so widely and 
eagerly received as the droppings of wisdom. Or, 
rather, is it not generally received because it flatters 
the weakness of humanity and is an opiate to the 
conscience? It is so much easier to drift with the 
wind of passion, and dream that it will float us 
to Schlaraffenland where, as Schopenhauer says, 
" everything grows of itself, and roasted pigeons fly 
around, and everybody finds his doxy at once and 
enjoys her without difficulty," than to seize hold of 



i go A VALIANT WOMAN 

the oars and with vigorous muscles row against the 
stream to shores that we know are safe. 

Every thinking man or woman arrived at maturity 
who prefers truth to illusion, and is not afraid to 
receive it, even when it is painful and refuses to 
flatter him, knows what love is and its importance; 
knows, too, that the deceptive illusions concerning its 
sacred and permanent character are not borne out by 
experience, but that it is simply an imperious in- 
stinct which as a powerful lever of the emotions dis- 
turbs temporarily the judgment, thus often leading 
to hastily formed relations which become a lifelong 
source of irritation and misery, while similar relations 
entered into with cool foresight and a feeling of re- 
spect and comradery are far more apt to end in 
quiet happiness. Literature and life are full of the 
wrecks of the so-called " divine passion." The most 
remarkable evidence of the capricious and blind char- 
acter of love has been made public in our day in 
the history of the son of the Grand Duke of Tus- 
cany, who renounced all his titles and dignities to 
marry a public singer. Three years of married life 
were more than sufficient to put an end to their ro- 
mantic love, and the disillusioned nobleman applied 
for a divorce. As there were not sufficient grounds 
for it, a final separation for life was agreed upon, 
and the nobleman begged to be reconciled to his f am- 



ETHICAL TEACHING 181 

ily and to be restored to the privileges which he had 
once so willingly renounced all for love and the world 
well lost. Doubtless, long before he was willing to 
acknowledge his mistake, he had felt the keen mis- 
ery of it, and knew that ardent love between the 
sexes is a temporary illusion, and that a marriage re- 
sulting from it has fewer chances of happiness than 
that which is based upon esteem and friendship. 
Such a statement is naturally revolting to youth, 
and especially to women who make a religion of love, 
because they are inclined by nature to faith and cre- 
dulity. This characteristic, except in very rare 
cases, follows them even in their highest intellectual 
development, and they throw off one religion to ac- 
cept another, changing their masters as they change 
their gowns. 

Even so brilliant a woman as Ellen Key is no ex- 
ception to this rule. She has freed herself from the 
Christian dogma. " Nothing is juster, from an evo- 
lutionary standpoint," she says, " than to treat Chris- 
tianity as we do the pearl oyster ; that is, throw away 
the larger, coarser part, and keep only the smaller 
and more valuable human personality of Christ." 
Nor is she readier to accept any of the philosophical 
systems as an explanation of the mysteries of life. 
She compares them to spider webs, the threads of 
which, spun out of the depths of consciousness, serve 



182 A VALIANT WOMAN 

only to catch flies, or to retain the dewdrops sparkling 
in the sun, but are as incapable of comprehending 
and explaining existence as the real spider webs of 
the forest. But faithless as she is in the direction 
of philosophy and dogma, her woman's heart can- 
not rest without an idol, and she makes a god of 
Eros, and spins her own dew-dropped, fly-catching 
web of human bliss out of the frailest of tissues ever 
woven by human imagination. 

Woman's greatest task, she affirms, is to give soul to 
life. " For the soul-giving Power is and remains 
Love, — Love that unites where reason separates ; and 
not alone as charity but as Eros, for whenever Love 
enlarges and unifies existence, whether such a Love be 
directed to the origin of life, or to the soul that be- 
comes one with our own, or to the being in whose 
veins courses our blood, or whether it belong to our 
Work, our country, or the world of beauty, the feel- 
ing, in so far as it is great, is a mystical religion 
with the soul-inspiring power that such a religion 
possesses. The conviction that erotic Love in the 
literal sense of the word, is the question of the soul, 
because it animates the soul, ennobles all its feelings, 
doubles our being, lifts us out of ourselves, — this 
was Rousseau's great revelation." 

This is passable rhetoric, but it is nothing more 
than rhetoric, a drop of liquor swelled into bubbling 



ETHICAL TEACHING 183 

foam — and the allusion to Rousseau as the St. John 
of this new religion is particularly unfortunate, but 
very natural, for Rousseau's nature was essentially 
feminine. The only manly thing about him was his 
marvelous gift of expression, a gift much more rarely 
accorded to women, and as seductive as the serpent 
in the Garden of Eden. He says of himself in a let- 
ter to Grimm in defense of his ingratitude towards 
Mme. D'Epinay: 

" Nobody knows how to put himself in my place, 
nobody is willing to see that I am a being apart who 
has not the character, the maxims, the resources of 
others, and who must not be judged by their rules." 

Granting this self -judgment to be correct, it 
would be a singular folly to make the maxims and 
sentiments of a " being apart " the guide and direct- 
or of beings in general. But the truth is that Rous- 
seau's temperament was only an exaggeration of that 
which is common to all supersensitive, weak, senti- 
mental, neurotic men and women. This tempera- 
ment is characterized by an irritable vanity ; 
absolutely insatiable with regard to adulation, quick 
to take offense at every fancied slight, implacable 
and unforgiving when offended, circling incessantly 
about itself, poisoning the present while feeding the 
imagination with brilliant pictures of the future, 
never blessed where it is, but always to be blessed 



i84 A VALIANT WOMAN 

where it is not, it multiplies its miseries and suffocates 
its joys. 

No one better than Saint-Marc Girardin has shown 
the morbid and weak character of Rousseau's sensi- 
bility and how very closely it is related to sensuality. 
" Rousseau," he writes, " abandoned Mme. de Warens 
6 without leaving or scarcely feeling the least regret 
for a separation the very thought of which would 
formerly have given us the anguish of death.' " 

" There are your heroes and heroines of sensibil- 
ity ! They think themselves born to live and die to- 
gether ; but let the least accident occur, an annoyance 
or an absence, and indifference and oblivion immedi- 
ately follow; inevitable conclusion of affections 
which the soul very inappropriately attributes to 
herself, but which come from chance and the heat of 
youth." 

Speaking of Rousseau's placing his children in a 
foundling asylum, Girardin remarks: 

" There, again, you have one of the most charac- 
teristic traits of sensibility. It is incapable of rec- 
ognizing duty, whenever duty appears in the form 
of an embarrassment or a. sacrifice unaccompanied 
by a feeling of pleasure. . . . Put no trust in the 
morality of a heart that searches its duties in emo- 
tions, and does not believe that man is obliged to do 
his duty except when he is agreeably moved. . . . 



Ethical teaching 185 

In all ages, the great corrupters are those who rep- 
resent good as evil, or evil as good: who say that 
property is theft, marriage is slavery, and adultery 
is liberty." 

This quotation deserves to be deeply pondered 
over; and the more it is meditated upon, the more 
firmly will every sensible man and woman be con- 
vinced that the prurient curiosity aroused by the 
continual discussion of erotic subjects in public, to- 
day, bodes no good to our youth and the future 
welfare of society. When it can go so far as to 
move a serious suggestion in a national educational 
assembly, for the introduction in our public schools 
for classes in courtship, as it did recently, it is cer- 
tainly time to cry halt. Hysterical phallic wor- 
ship can hardly go farther, but it argues a singular 
license of public sentiment when it can go so far. 
In a letter to Mazzini, George Sand writes of an ac- 
quaintance : 

" She is infatuated with herself. . . . Man and 
woman are everything to her, and the sex question in 
that acceptation of the term in which the thought 
of neither man nor woman ought to rest exclusively, 
effaces in her the idea of the human being who is al- 
ways the same being, and who ought not to be per- 
fected either as man or woman, but as a soul and 
as a child of God. From this preoccupation, there 



186 A VALIANT WOMAN 

arises in her a sort of hysterical condition which she 
does not realize, but which exposes her to being the 
dupe of the first rogue that comes along. I believe 
that her conduct is chaste, but her mind is not, and 
perhaps that is worse. I should prefer her having 
lovers and never talking about them, to her not hav- 
ing any and ceaselessly talking about them." 

This is remarkably applicable to Ellen Key and 
her followers, and to all so-called " advanced think- 
ers " in the erotic line who smut innocence with 
hideous suspicions, and are for tearing all the buds 
open to look for worms. That exquisitely delicate 
and subtle French thinker, Joubert, has left us a beau- 
tiful essay entitled, What is Modesty? in which he 
compares it to a protective tissue or shelter which Na- 
ture gives to her incomplete creations to assure them 
that rest, solitude, and safety which precede their 
completion. It is in reality only a beautiful amplifi- 
cation of an old Hindoo saying : " Grains of rice 
shaken out of their husks will not ripen." " Do we 
need to speak of its necessity? " adds Joubert. 
" What the white of the egg, and that web in which 
they are contained, is to the young of birds ; what the 
husk of the seed is to the plant in embryo; what 
the calyx is to the flower; what the sky is to the 
earth, — that is what modesty is to our virtues. 
Without this preserving shelter, they could not be 



ETHICAL TEACHING 187 

disclosed. Their sanctuary would be violated, the 
germ nakedly exposed, and the progeny lost. 

" Let us apply this idea to ourselves. We all have 
modesty, but not an identical modesty. This imma- 
terial veil is of various textures. It is given to all of 
us, but not with equal bounty, nor with equal favor. 
Some have a coarsely woven modesty, others have but 
a shred of it. Only those who bear within them the 
germ of all the perfections have perfect and entire 
modesty. We do not always keep it. It is like 
beauty: frightful accident may ravish it from us; 
and without effort it diminishes of itself and is ef- 
faced, when it becomes useless and its end is attained. 
In fact, modesty persists in us as long as there is 
in us some unknown particle that has not yet taken 
on its substance and all its solidity, and until our 
organs are capable of receiving and retaining eternal 
impressions. But when the soft seeds of our solid 
qualities have reached their full development, when 
our first affections, like milk which coagulates, have 
produced kindness in us, or our natural kindness has 
become unalterable; when the mind, nourished with 
chaste ideas, is developed and can retain that equilib- 
rium which we call reason, or our reason is formed; 
when moral rectitude has insensibly acquired that 
indestructibility which we call character ; in short, 
when the secret principle of any depravity can no 



1 88 A VALIANT WOMAN 

longer enter into us without our will, or wound us 
without our knowledge, our defense is in ourselves, — 
then man is finished, — the veil falls, and the net is 
unraveled. Yet even then modesty imprints its 
vestiges in us, and leaves us its shield. ... It be- 
queathes us still more precious fruits ; — a pure 
taste whose original delicacy has never been dulled, 
a clear imagination of which nothing has tarnished 
the polish, an alert and able mind, quick to rise to 
the sublime, an exquisite flexibility, the love of sim- 
ple pleasures, the only ones that have long been 
known, facility in being happy from the habit of 
finding happiness in one's self, something comparable 
to the velvety surface of flowers that were a long 
time protected so that no breath could sully them, 
a charm borne in the soul which it lends to all things 
so that it can love ceaselessly, an eternal chastity; 
for it must be avowed here, else it might be forgot- 
ten, — no pleasure can soil the soul when it has passed 
through senses in which this incorruptibility has 
been deposited at leisure, and slowly incorporated; in 
short, such a habit of contentment with one's self 
that one cannot live without it, and one must live 
irreproachably who is able to live contented." 

Yet it is this protective veil whose uses Joubert 
so beautifully describes; this shelter of the virtues, 



ETHICAL TEACHING 189 

which many in our day would ruthlessly destroy, de- 
fending their intentions with sensual sophistries, for- 
getting entirely that the premature enlightenment 
which they defend has not purified the slums where 
it is the rule, not the exception. Therefore, the wise 
teacher will preside over no courtship classes, will 
watch rather that this exquisite protective veil is 
not rent too soon, and will not encourage the bold 
familiarity which characterizes the attitude of boys 
and girls to each other. Not long ago, the mother 
of an only child, a son, said to me : "I used to 
think that it was good for a boy to be in the society 
of girls. I believed that it refined him in thought 
and speech, but I am beginning to doubt it. The 
other day, I reproved my boy for a coarse expression, 
and I said, 6 I trust you never so far forget your- 
self as to talk in that way before girls. Remember 
that what does not shock you, may deeply offend the 
delicacy of a young girl.' The boy burst out laugh- 
ing, and said : ' Mother, you don't know the girls 
nowadays. They're not like what they used to be 
when you were a girl. I've heard tougher talk from 
girls than I ever heard from boys.' It hurt me inde- 
scribably to hear him say that, for what safety is 
there for a boy whose ideals of womanhood are de- 
based or destroyed? " 

I thought of Coventry Patmore's lines: 



igo A VALIANT WOMAN 

" O wasteful woman ! she who may 
On her sweet self set her own price, 
Knowing he cannot choose but pay, 
How has she cheapened Paradise! 
How given for naught her priceless gift, 
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine 
Which spent with due respective thrift 
Had made brutes men, and men divine ! " 

Modesty in dress, in speech, in action, — this it is 
our duty to teach; not harshly, but with persuasive 
and eloquent insistence. A style of dressing pre- 
vails among high-school girls which is the extreme 
of bad taste and impropriety. The painted faces, 
bare arms and necks, the gaudy jingling ornaments, 
the peculiar cut of the dress designed to show every 
movement and outline of the figure, betray too plainly 
that it is not enlightenment in the direction of sen- 
sual snares that is needed, but rather restraint, les- 
sons in modest behavior, in quiet, sensible dressing, 
and in courtesy and thoughtfulness of others. 

A very sensible Scotch woman once called upon me 
in Edinburgh, very richly dressed, and said to me, 
apologizing for the elegance of her dress : " I did 
not dress to call upon you, for I knew you would 
care to see me and not my dressmaker's work; but 
I had to go to an Intelligence Office this morning to 
look for a servant, and that class of people never 
look below the surface, but judge you always by 



ETHICAL TEACHING 191 

your clothes. Had I gone plainly dressed, I should 
have been rated as a woman for whom it would not be 
worth while to work, and I shouldn't have been able 
to get a girl." 

How common among us is this servant eye, be- 
traying the innate vulgarity of the soul! How 
wrong we are to let its judgments pass unchallenged, 
instead of teaching that simplicity of dress and man- 
ners is the chief ornament of youth! The high, 
shrill voices should be softened, the loud laughter 
checked, the bad taste corrected, the boldness re- 
proved. This is ethical' teaching, for it is teaching 
the suppression of vanity, selfishness, and immodesty, 
and setting up in their places the ideals which repre- 
sent their opposites. An education which does not 
issue in quiet, beautiful manners and real kindness of 
heart is wanting in more than half its value, but that 
the education of our public schools as often issues 
in boorishness as otherwise is a most serious reproach 
to it. The eyes are not turned away from self, but 
are directed inward. We are so afraid that our 
young people may not like being educated that we 
free them from as much restraint as possible, lest 
discipline and study should interfere with their hav- 
ing a good time, and thus cut them off entirely from 
the larger life which begins with forgetfulness of self 



192 A VALIANT WOMAN 

to widen into interest in others. Ruskin has given 
a capital picture of the result of this sort of train- 
ing in Fors Clavigera : , 

" 1 had to go to Verona," he reports, " by the after- 
noon train. In the carriage with me were two Amer- 
ican girls with their father and mother, people of the 
class which has lately made so much money suddenly, 
and does not know what to do with it ; and these two 
girls about fifteen and eighteen had evidently been 
indulged in everything ( since they had had the means ) 
which western civilization could imagine. And here 
they were, two specimens of the utmost which the 
money and invention of the nineteenth century could 
produce in maidenhood, — children of its most pro- 
gressive race, enjoying the full advantage of polit- 
ical liberty, of enlightened philosophical education, of 
cheap pilfered literature, and of luxury at any cost. 
Whatever money, machinery, or freedom of thought 
could do for these two children had been done. No 
superstition had deceived, no restraint degraded 
them: types they could not but be, of maidenly wis- 
dom and felicity as conceived by the forwardest in- 
tellects of our time. 

" And thej- were traveling through a district which, 
if any in the world, should touch the hearts and de- 
light the eyes of young girls. Between Venice and 
Verona! Portia's villa perhaps in sight upon the 



ETHICAL TEACHING 193 

Brenta, — Juliet's tomb to be visited in the even- 
ing, — blue against the southern sky, the hills of Pe- 
trarch's home. Exquisite midsummer sunshine, with 
low rays, glanced through the vine-leaves; all the 
Alps were clear, from the lake of Garda to Cadore, 
and to farthest Tyrol. What a princess's chamber, 
this, if these are princesses, and what dreams might 
they not dream, therein! 

" But the two American girls were neither prin- 
cesses, nor seers, nor dreamers. By infinite self-in- 
dulgence, they had reduced themselves simply to two 
pieces of white putty that could feel pain. The flies 
and dust stuck to them as to clay, and they perceived 
between Venice and Verona nothing but the flies and 
the dust. They pulled down the blinds the moment 
they entered the carriage, and they sprawled and 
writhed and tossed among the cushions of it in vain 
contest, during the whole fifty miles, with every mis- 
erable sensation of bodily affliction that could make 
time intolerable. They were dressed in thin white 
frocks, coming vaguely open at the backs as they 
stretched or wriggled; they had French novels, 
lemons, and lumps of sugar, to beguile their state 
with; the novels hanging together by the ends of 
string that once had stitched them, or adhering at 
the corners in densely bruised dog's-ears, out of 
which the girls, wetting their fingers occasionally, ex- 



194 A VALIANT WOMAN 

tricated a gluey leaf. From time to time they cut 
a lemon open, ground a lump of sugar backwards and 
forwards over it till every fiber was in a treacly 
pulp ; then sucked the pulp, and gnawed the white 
skin into leathery strings, for the sake of its bitter. 
Only one sentence was exchanged in the fifty miles, 
on the subject of things outside the carnage (the 
Alps being once visible from a station where they 
had drawn up the blinds). 

" ' Don't those snow-caps make you cool? ' 

" ' No, I wish they did.' 

" And so they went their way, with sealed eyes and 
tormented limbs, their numbered miles of pain." 

Have we any part in this hopeless sealing of the 
eyes of the young when we encourage their self-in- 
dulgence in a thousand ways, requiring neither a 
show of respect nor prompt, unquestioning obedience 
from them, eager to plan new amusements, new en- 
tertainments for them, rather than to prepare them 
to find their entertainment in themselves? The se- 
vere training of our fathers was far superior to this, 
for, at least, it produced self-control and independ- 
ence; and it is high time that we should begin to 
realize that our public schools cannot successfully 
combine the complete training of an educational in- 
stitute and the attractiveness of a moving picture 
show or variety theater. We cannot play at work 



ETHICAL TEACHING 195 

and do the highest work. Our high schools and col- 
leges are overrun with young people who go there, 
not because they are at all solicitous about getting 
an education, or can take it if they would, but be- 
cause they are dull at home and want amusement. 
It is not necessary that everybody should be edu- 
cated, because not everybody can be : " Rotten wood 
cannot be carved, walls made of dirt and mud can- 
not be plastered ; " but it is necessary that every one 
who can profit by educational advantages and really 
wants them, should have them under the very best 
conditions obtainable, undiluted with weak concessions 
to incompetency, love of idleness, and love of amuse- 
ment. Our mission as educators is not to encourage 
mediocrity, but to assure to ability the training it 
needs for its highest development. It is our duty, 
also, to teach the beauty of truth, honesty, self-con- 
trol, kindliness, cheerfulness, duty, and the privilege 
of work. 

The widespread Boy Scout movement is a step in 
the right direction most urgently needed at present, 
for it supplies the ethical discipline so frequently 
wanting in our educational training; and a careful 
study of the manual which is put into the hands of 
the young scouts would furnish many solicitous 
parents and teachers with useful hints as to what 
ought to be done for their own young charges. For 



196 A VALIANT WOxMAN 

mere facts are not the vitalizing part of an educa- 
tion; it is the thrill that accompanies the recognition 
of the beauty of an ethical ideal that frees the soul 
from self, and gives it the conditions of noble growth. 
It is a mistake to suppose that an aesthetic train- 
ing is essentially a moral training, and that the love 
of beauty in art or literature can take the place of 
the deeper, austerer love of duty for its own sake, as 
an ethical guide. The terrible example of the au- 
thor of De Profundis should burn that lesson ineradi- 
cably into the memory of his century. It is a mistake 
to believe that duty can be sugar-coated like a pill, 
or ethics taught in the guise of amusement. The 
great trouble with all modern ethical teaching is that 
it strives to cover its real austerity with a mas- 
querade costume instead of awakening a devotion to 
its very seriousness. The churches are not willing 
any longer to be quiet sanctuaries for the soul, re- 
freshing oases of peaceful meditation in the strife 
and bustle of the world. They are intent upon an- 
nexing the world and what seems to them its most 
innocent pleasures. A California clergyman who 
found that he could not fill his church by preaching 
from Biblical texts, hit upon giving a series of lec- 
tures on out-of-door sports, and appeared one morn- 
ing in the pulpit with a shotgun and a game-bag 
in his hand. He drew a crowd; the next Sunday, 



ETHICAL TEACHING 197 

he brought a tennis racket and ball; and then box- 
ing gloves, and the crowd grew larger. He was 
elated; but his mistake lay in supposing that men 
and women are essentially any better off in one place 
than in another, if they are occupied with the same 
thoughts and the same pleasures. Gambling on the 
steps of a church is no more respectable than gam- 
bling in the saloon across the way; and tennis and 
hunting out in the fresh air are much better than 
tennis and hunting in the pulpit. Spectacular eth- 
ics, dramatic readings from Job, never rise above 
the spectacle nor the boards of a theater. Boden- 
stedt says finely : 

"Der Staub wie hoch der Wind ihn audi erhebt, bleibt doch 

gemein : 
Der Edelstein den man in Staub begrabt, bleibt Edelstein." 

(The dust, no matter how high the wind may whirl it, is com- 
mon still, 
The diamond, though buried in the dust, remains a diamond.) 

Professional reformers are apt in private to need 
reforming themselves. The rose does not say a word 
about being beautiful. It just is beautiful and 
smells sweet. The sun does not say : How fine it is 
to be brilliant! It simply shines, and warms the 
earth. So the life within us should radiate silently 
and pour forth its fragrance. There is something 
very touching and very helpful in Pestalozzi's ac- 



198 A VALIANT WOMAN 

count of his experience with eighty children, many 
of whom on their arrival, he tells us, were very de- 
generated specimens of humanity, covered with ver- 
min, suffering from chronic skin diseases, degraded 
by misfortune and suffering, and wholly without af- 
fection. But months of patient training revealed 
that he had touched the latent springs of higher 
growth in them. How? By set lectures? No. 
" I gave my children very few explanations. I 
taught them neither morality nor religion. But 
sometimes, when they were perfectly quiet, I used to 
say to them : ' Do you not think that you are better 
and more reasonable when you are like this, than 
when you are making a noise? ' When they clung 
round my neck and called me their father, I used 
to say : 6 My children, would it be right to deceive 
your father? After kissing me like this, would you 
like to do anything behind my back to vex me? ' 
When our talk turned on the misery of the country, 
and they were feeling glad at the thought of their 
own happier lot, I would say : ' How good God is 
to have given man a compassionate heart.' " 

In short, Pestalozzi took care to see that his soil 
was ready for the seed before he dropped it into the 
ground. When the children were obstinate and 
churlish, he did not attempt to reason with them, 
knowing very well how useless that would be; he 



ETHICAL TEACHING 199 

simply punished them, and there was an end of the 
matter. 

Another great mistake that we make in our con- 
sideration of the question of ethics is to suppose that 
knowledge is always the great moral regenerator, and 
that by popular education, by enlightenment in all 
directions, we shall finally be able to shut the doors 
of our prisons and our almshouses. This error per- 
sists singularly, in spite of all experience to the con- 
trary, and in spite of the clear and convincing way 
in which many great thinkers have exposed it. No 
one has done so better than Herbert Spencer. 

" To say that men are ruled by reason," he as- 
serts, " is as irrational as to say that men are ruled 
by their eyes. Reason is an eye — the eye through 
which the desires see their way to gratification. And 
educating it only makes it a better eye, gives it a 
vision more accurate and more comprehensive, does 
not at all alter the desires subserved by it. How- 
ever far-seeing you make it, the passions will still 
determine the directions in which it shall be turned 
— the objects on which it shall dwell. Just those 
ends which the instincts or sentiments propose, will 
the intellect be employed to accomplish: culture of 
it having done nothing but increase the ability to 
accomplish them. . . . Did much knowledge and 
piercing intelligence suffice to make men good, then 



200 A VALIANT WOMAN 

Bacon should have been honest and Napoleon should 
have been just. Wherever the character is defect- 
ive, intellect, no matter how high, fails to regu- 
late rightly, because predominant desires falsify its 
estimate. Nay, even a distinct foresight of evil con- 
sequences will not restrain, when strong passions are 
at work. How else does it happen that men will get 
drunk, though they know drunkenness will entail on 
them suffering and disgrace and (as with the poor) 
even starvation? How else is it that medical stu- 
dents who know the diseases brought on by disso- 
lute living better than other young men, are just as 
reckless and even more reckless? . . . Whatever 
moral benefit can be effected by education must be 
effected by an education which is emotional rather 
than perceptive. If, in place of making a child un- 
derstand that this thing is right and the other 
wrong, you make it feel that they are so — if you 
make virtue loved and vice loathed, if you arouse 
a noble desire, and make torpid an inferior one ■ — 
if you bring into life a previously dormant senti- 
ment • — if you cause a sympathetic impulse to get 
the better of one that is selfish — if, in short, you 
produce a state of mind to which proper behavior is 
natural, spontaneous, instinctive, you do some good. 
But no drilling in catechisms, no teaching of moral 
codes, can effect this. Only by repeatedly awaken- 



ETHICAL TEACHING 201 

ing the appropriate emotions can character be 
changed. New ideas received by the intellect meet- 
ing no response from within — having no roots there 
— are quite inoperative upon conduct, and are 
quickly forgotten upon entering into life." 

This truth falling from the lips of an English 
philosopher, is eloquently repeated by an Italian man 
of letters, Francesco de Sanctis, in an address en- 
titled Learning and Life; and as it seems to me a 
truth that needs repetition, I shall not hesitate to 
give some space to his rendering of it. We see 
farther when we mingle the light of other men's 
thoughts with our own. 

" Is to know really to do? " asks De Sanctis. " Is 
knowledge the same thing as life? Is it the whole 
of life? Is it able to arrest the course of corruption 
and dissolution, renew the blood, transform the char- 
acter? . . . Learning increases at the expense of 
life. The greater its contribution to thought, the 
more it takes away from action. We know life 
when it is leaving us ; our comprehension of it comes 
when its power is waning. Faith dies; philosophy 
is born. Art is setting and criticism dawns. His- 
tory is finished, and the historian appears. Morals 
grow corrupt, and moralists come. The state falls 
into ruin, and statecraft begins. The gods go, and 
Socrates accompanies them with his irony. The arts 



202 A VALIANT WOMAN 

vanish, and Aristotle makes an inventory of them; 
the republic declines, and Plato constructs an ideal 
republic; public life grows corrupt, and great ora- 
tors arise; the eloquence of speech succeeds the elo- 
quence of action. Livy narrates the story of a 
grandeur that was, with a prelude that might almost 
be called a funereal eulogy; and there is something 
funereal breathing from the profound and melancholy 
note of the last historians, Thucydides and Tacitus. 
Life is dissolute, and Seneca gives point to moral epi- 
grams. Life is dead, and Plutarch strays among the 
tombs and collects the memorials of illustrious men. 
" Therefore, is learning, the latest fount of life, 
able to re-create the tree of life? . . . Learning 
could illustrate, but it could not regenerate Greek 
and Roman life. It was powerless, yet it believed 
that it had power and this faith was its strength. 
The truth for which it searched would have seemed 
unworthy of esteem, if it had not had faith that this 
truth could be transfused into life. Plato saw in 
learning an ethical instrument and aim in the edu- 
cation of youth and in the prosperity of the state, 
and because art appeared to him corrupting, he 
abandoned it. Aristotle also considered ethics as 
the supreme end of learning, and pardoned the arts, 
because there was in them an ethical end, the puri- 
fication of the passions. Socrates thought that by 



ETHICAL TEACHING 203 

controlling the young, he would be able to overthrow 
the sophists and restore national life. Plato goes to 
Syracuse, called there to regenerate that people, 
and his learning cannot for a moment arrest the 
course of history. The more flexible life becomes, 
the more rigid learning grows. They grow more 
and more apart in their path, without any reciprocal 
action. Contrasting with the vast corruption of the 
empire, rise the austere stoics. Stoicism is able to 
attract individuals to itself, but it is not able to 
form or reform any society ; therefore it was the sci- 
ence of despair, a consecration in the presence of' 
social dissolution, a sauve qui pent, wisdom safely re- 
tired within itself, impassive to the vicissitudes of the 
external world, — the deserter from society. Learn- 
ing, working upon a world already corrupt, where 
liberty, having become license, had produced despot- 
ism, and where various races were unified by con- 
quest, had the effect of diminishing or even obliter- 
ating local differences and local energies. It was 
good for systematizing and organizing that vast 
ensemble and introducing order and fixed laws which, 
even to-day, are documents of ancient grandeur. 
But a new spirit could not breathe life into that 
learned mechanism, nor restore moral and organic 
forces. It worked on the summit already ruined and 
crumbling away, and neglected the foundation, the 



204 A VALIANT WOMAN 

lowest social strata where the moral forces were still 
latent and entire, and where the followers of Christ 
were working more efficiently. One day, Learning 
ascended to the royal palace and seated herself by 
the side of Julian and held in her hand the entire 
power, and could not stop the dissolution of pagan 
life nor delay the formation of Christian life. Yet 
how proud that society was of its learning; with 
what contempt it treated the barbarians! and how 
scornfully would it have laughed had some ill-ad- 
vised prophet told it that those very barbarians were 
predestined to be its heirs and its masters ! 

" Barbarism effaced, faith in knowledge is re- 
born, and miracles are expected of it. The ideal 
is Beatrice; faith is learning; life is a hell which 
Knowledge is, little by little, to transform into para- 
dise; and paradise is universal monarchy, the reign 
of justice and peace, where Knowledge recognizes 
herself. The renaissance appeared, and Learning 
really believed that she was able to restore life. 
Learning was called Machiavelli, Campanella, Sarpi, 
and life was Caesar Borgia, Leo X, and Philip II, 
and facts remained facts. The last ray of a glori- 
ous life reflected in art, produced a limpid and beau- 
tiful form, marked here and there with sadness and 
irony, as if it felt itself nothing but form, empty 
of content, empty of organism. That which was 



ETHICAL TEACHING 205 

called its golden age, flourishing with studies, arts, 
sciences, was its splendid age of sunset ; it was the 
dream of Michelangelo and the sadness of Machia- 
velli. 

" Later on, learning worked like a religion, be- 
cause an apostolate was propagated among the peo- 
ple; it found its center of expansion in the French 
spirit and provoked a memorable movement, the 
oscillations of which continue to be felt to-day. A 
new society is born, a new life is formed; learning 
has its apostles, martyrs, legislators, its catechism; 
and it penetrates everywhere, into religion, morals, 
law, the arts, and into political, economical and ad- 
ministrative systems, and niters through all social 
institutions. But it was learning, and its effects 
were those of learning. It believed that renewing 
the idea and renewing life are one and the same 
thing, that knowing is the same as doing. It ap- 
plied its logic to life as a fatal and inexorable con- 
sequence from given premises. It searched the 
premises in its principles, and in its formulas ; not in 
the real and effective conditions of life. It treated 
the social organism as a machine, and treated men 
like the pawns on a chess-board that could be shoved 
about according to its game. It conceived life as 
a scientific ideal, and squinting at that ideal, weak- 
ened, while wishing to perfect them, all social or- 



206 A VALIANT WOMAN 

ganizations, religions, arts, society, the state and the 
family. When life, thus trampled on, reacted, it 
killed liberty in the name of liberty ; it made men un- 
natural in the name of nature, and wishing by force 
to make them equals and brothers, it was science and 
became force; it was the summit, and neglected the 
base; and one fine day the base caved in and swal- 
lowed up the summit. And thus the reign of philos- 
ophy disappeared. Life avenged itself and in con- 
tempt called it ideology, and believed a little less in 
ideas and more in things. The more intense had been 
the faith in learning, the bitterer was the disillusion- 
ment, but it had wrested this hard truth from the ex- 
perience, — Learning is not Life. 

" In the presence of these examples I meditate seri- 
ously, and ask myself, What is the life of a peo- 
ple? A people lives when all its moral forces are 
intact. These forces are not produced unless they 
find outer stimuli. The more vigorous these stimuli, 
the greater their intensity and vivacity. Stimuli cre- 
ate a limit for their action ; that is to say, an ob j ect 
which destroys the vagueness of their liberty, deter- 
mines them, gives them a direction. These forces 
are productive, in proportion to the limitations of 
their liberty. When you take away a limit even 
from a strong man, he will create it for himself; and 
if he cannot do it legitimately, he will do it illegiti- 



ETHICAL TEACHING 207 

mately, because his strength needs a limit as the means 
needs an end. The priest is an example of this, and 
since sons are denied him, he is all the more tena- 
ciously attached to his nephews. The weaker the sen- 
timent of limitation in a people, the weaker and the 
nearer dissolution it is: on the contrary, life is more 
potent, the more the conscience is developed through 
limitations." 

I am tempted to continue translating the entire 
address, because it is so fine a criticism of modern 
short-sightedness and blunders as to moral panaceas 
for the ills of society, in the form of breaking down 
all limitations of family and social ties, and remov- 
ing all restrictions of duty. Let the philosopher be 
permitted in his study, under the roof, to look at 
humanity and human relations sub specie eternitas, 
and feel himself loosed from all obligations and lim- 
its because of their infinite pettiness. When at night, 
from his attic skylight, he looks up at the stars, let 
him feel himself, if he likes, the superhuman for 
whom only the absolute exists; but when he comes 
downstairs to breakfast in the morning, let him come 
without his philosophy, content to see in the relative 
and the limited the real tissue of human life, and 
ready to respect its limitations and relativity because 
he feels their necessity. We are not in need of more 
liberty, but of wise restrictions of it through a higher 



2o8 A VALIANT WOMAN 

moral sense. We are suffering from what Faguet 
thinks is the peculiar malady of democracies — the 
" cult of incompetence and the horror of responsi- 
bility." It is not thoroughness, but a superficial 
cleverness, which we admire. It is not the truth 
which we wish to hear, but the fulsome flattery which 
exalts us above every other nation on the earth. We 
shrink from the strong individuality that expresses 
itself uniquely, and slavishly follow where the multi- 
tude leads. We respect intelligence when it has a 
bank account ; and in the eyes of the general public, 
our school system exists, not for the spread of learn- 
ing, but to furnish the best preparation for " getting 
on in the world," or, in other words, securing a bank 
account. " Socrates was happy," says Renan, " in 
living in an age when the tliinker had nothing to 
dread but hemlock." He has to dread to-day, not 
the extinction of the thinker, but the extinction of 
thought. 



CHAPTER VI 

METHODS AND METHOD MAKERS 

TT 7ERE I asked by what method the rare teacher 
" " of my childhood imparted her instruction, I 
should be at a loss to give it a name, so individ- 
ual and so varied was it. It did not proceed from 
a conscious imitation of any of the great lead- 
ers of education, although she knew the trend of 
their thought. It was something living and flexible 
that grew out of the present needs of the children 
under her care, varying from day to day and from 
child to child. It was not method that she brought 
into the schoolroom, so much as an inundation of 
common sense. She had none of that effervescent 
enthusiasm which Voltaire describes as making the 
mind " like an oven in which everything is heated 
and nothing bakes." She was capable of inde- 
fatigable drudgery when drudgery was necessary, 
finding no short cuts to mental illumination by 
twisting the trite phrase, hilling the spirit by the 
letter, into meaning the neglect of a substantial 
foundation for the sake of the roof and the sky- 
lights. She was shrewd enough to see that in that 

209 



210 A VALIANT WOMAN 

case, her building would only topple down and the 
skylights be inevitably ruined. She built slowly 
that she might build well. She built with no unsea- 
soned timber, lest it should warp and shrink. " First 
the blade, then the ear, and after that the full corn 
in the ear " — perhaps this luminous saying better 
than anything else would describe her method. 

We are trying now with all our might to get the 
full corn without the blade or the ear, and then com- 
plain because we cannot do it. She told me once 
that when a child, she had been very solicitous about 
some little chickens which she did not think were 
treated by the mother hen with enough attention. 
Her mother restored her confidence by saying, " My 
child, you can't teach an old hen how to take care 
of chickens, and you needn't try." She seemed to 
carry this confidence to the great brood-mother 
Nature and to distrust any forcing process that 
would overhasten development. " I give young peo- 
ple," she used to say, " a long time to find them- 
selves and to develop." She knew that life itself, 
and not the schoolroom, was to be their great teacher, 
and that her especial business was to train them to 
profit by life's lessons — train them in love of ac- 
curacy, patience, the power of self-help, and the 
knowledge of the dignity of work. She dreaded 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 211 

nothing so much as weakening them by vanity, friv- 
olous amusement, or unnecessary assistance. 

In reading Emile Faguet's monograph on Mme. de 
Maintenon, Institutrice, I was struck by the remark- 
able resemblance between our valiant woman's attitude 
toward the young and that of Mme. de Maintenon; 
and those admirable talks to the girls of St. Cyr have 
the same note as those she gave to us. Not method, 
then, but an intimate knowledge of life and its de- 
mands, a deep love of children and joy in teaching 
them, made her, as they made Mme. de Maintenon, a 
great teacher. Perhaps nothing else ever lies at the 
bottom of admirable teaching; and what we call 
method is originally only some marked individual way 
of expressing these characteristics. But the word has 
acquired in our day a quite special significance, and it 
is used as if the art of teaching could be reduced to 
fixed principles, instead of being as varied as human 
personality and as essentially inimitable. A man- 
ner of teaching which in one individual leads to ex- 
cellent results may be absolutely futile and ridiculous 
in another ; and for want of knowing this fact, educa- 
tion has suffered, and is destined to continue to suf- 
fer, from repeated experiments. 

The most notable of these experiments have been 
due to the influence of three remarkable men, — Rous- 



212 A VALIANT WOMAN 

seau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. All three of them 
were self-educated, and they necessarily brought to 
their ideas of education the freedom from conven- 
tionalities which had marked their own training. All 
three were men of thought, rather than of action, 
consequently their theory and practice were some- 
times inconsistent ; but as Tolstoi says : " Though 
I stagger drunkenly towards home, wandering often 
from the path, it does not alter the fact that the 
path leads towards home." They were men in whom 
the feminine characteristics, sensibility and senti- 
ment, predominated over reason, therefore they 
broke down the rigidity and austerity of the old edu- 
cational system and introduced into it the much- 
needed mother-element; and it was to mothers that 
they made their appeal. Unfortunately, it is this 
mother-element in their methods which has particu- 
larly survived, not in its original purity, but in a 
degenerated state of indulgence which more than any- 
thing else lies at the bottom of the deplorable con- 
dition to which we have come in our efforts to spread 
the light of knowledge. It might more truthfully be 
said, that instead of spreading the light, we are busy 
manufacturing all sorts of colored, smoked, and 
ground glass to obscure or make agreeable the light 
for weak eyes. But it is the bright white daylight 
of knowledge and the strong eyes, that the world 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 213 

needs. It would be interesting and profitable to 
consider the aims and methods of these three great 
teachers in order to understand more clearly what 
we have rejected, retained, or distorted of their in- 
structions. 

It is well known that Rousseau's educational ideas 
at their best are but an amplification of those to be 
found in Plato's Republic (which he called the finest 
treatise on education ever written) and in Mon- 
taigne's Essays. It was Plato who first said that 
" no study pursued under compulsion remains rooted 
in the memory," and that " children must be trained 
to their studies in a playful manner, and without 
any air of constraint, with the further object of dis- 
cerning more readily the natural bent of their re- 
spective characters." As for Montaigne, the method 
he pursued in his studies was that of every growing 
mind. When he could do so, he got his knowledge at 
first hand. He trusted his own senses. He trav- 
eled in other men's minds, but he made a home in his 
own. His knowledge was not something foreign and 
accidental, adhering to his mind as a burr to one's 
coat. It was a part of himself. It had grown up 
in him out of observation and experience. " I love 
knowledge as much as any one," he tells us ; " but 
I hate an understanding which is only a memory, 
which can say nothing except by book. I hate it 



214 A VALIANT WOMAN 

worse than stupidity ! " He likens a pedant with 
his unreasoning, memory-clogged brain to " those 
birds which go in quest of grain and carry it to their 
young in their beaks without tasting it. The 
pedant's knowledge lodges at the end of his tongue, 
and he only disgorges it. ... I have seen in my time 
a hundred artisans, a hundred peasants, wiser and 
happier than the rectors of universities and whom 
I would rather be like. I have put forth all my ef- 
forts to form my life; my studies have taught me 
how to act rather than how to write. Great God! 
how I should hate to be recommended as a clever 
writer and yet as a man of naught, a fool or simple- 
ton. Look on the ground at the poor people bend- 
ing over their task, who neither know Aristotle nor 
Cato, nor an example nor precept of theirs, yet na- 
ture begets in them every day effects of constancy 
and patience purer and more austere than any of 
those we study so curiously in the schools. The man 
who is digging my garden, yonder, buried his father 
or his son this morning. They keep their bed only 
to die upon it." 

Montaigne loved moderation and flexibility and 
declared that obstinacy and ardor of opinion are the 
surest proofs of foolishness, and that he has known 
in his time many a fool who earned a reputation 
for prudence and sagacity by a cold and taciturn 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 215 

mien. " Yet," he observes, " is there anything so 
resolute, disdainful, contemplative, grave, and serious 
as the ass? " 

He thinks cheerfulness and serenity the supreme 
mark of wisdom, and likes better the laugher than the 
wailer at the calamities of life. His ideal of edu- 
cation is to do, and not to talk about doing. He 
complains that we are not really taught until life is 
past, that we teach the etymology and declension of 
virtue, and not how to love it. He accuses teachers 
of training the memory of a child and not his power 
to reason and reflect, saying: 

" If my pupil's soul has not been given a higher 
impulse, if his judgment is not made sounder, I 
would rather he had passed his time playing tennis 
than in going to school ; for his body, at least, would 
have been made suppler and stronger. Look at him, 
on Ms return from school after fifteen or sixteen 
years spent in study. He is good for nothing. His 
Latin and Greek have made him more foolish and 
presumptuous than he was on leaving home. He 
ought to have brought back a full mind; he has 
brought back an inflated one. Instead of enlarging 
his mind, he has only puffed it up. The aim of study 
is to grow better and wiser. Who asks his pupils 
what he thinks of such and such a Ciceronian pas- 
sage? . . . Let a wise curiosity be awakened concern- 



216 A VALIANT WOMAN 

ing the nature of all things. Let him notice what is 
singular around him, — a building, a fountain, a 
man, an old battle-field, the passage of Caesar or 
Charlemagne. Let him inquire as to the morals, the 
means, the alliances of this or that person; these are 
very agreeable things to learn and very useful to 
know. Let the teacher not so much impress the pu- 
pil's mind with the date of the ruin of Carthage as 
with the morals of Hannibal and Scipio ; not so 
much where Marcellus died ? as why he was recreant to 
his duty that he died there. 

" Let him know the difference between knowing 
and not knowing, which ought to be the real aim of 
study. Let him learn what courage and temperance 
are, what can be said in comparing ambition and 
avarice, servitude and submission, license and lib- 
erty; by what signs we know true and solid happi- 
ness; how far death and pain and disgrace are to be 
feared; what motives impel us to action and are the 
spring of so many diverse emotions in us; for it 
seems to me that the first discourses which we owe 
him on the enlightenment of his understanding are 
those which regulate his morals and his senses ; which 
teach him to know himself, and to know how to live 
and how to die. It is great folly to teach children 
the knowledge of the stars and the movements of the 
eighth sphere, before they know anything about their 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 217 

own. ... I would rather know myself than Cicero. 
If I am a good learner, my own experiences are suffi- 
cient to make me wise. Caesar's life is no fuller of 
example to us than our own. . . . 

" After we have taught the pupil what will make 
him wiser and better, then let us teach him logic, 
physics, geometry, and rhetoric. And above all, we 
must not forget that the whole man should be trained. 
It is not a soul, it is not a body, that is being trained, 
but a man, and we must not make two of him." 

For permanent value in the science of education, 
these brief, pithy sentences are worth volumes of 
ordinary pedagogy, and when we think that we are 
making some advance in teaching, we are only carry- 
ing out their instruction. Montaigne thought it a 
great advantage to know Latin and Greek, but that 
the knowledge could be bought too dear. He op- 
posed all unnecessary constraint and severity in the 
training of the young, yet by no means favored a 
weak indulgence. On the contrary, he believed that 
the authority of the governor of a child should be 
sovereign, that a child should not always be educated 
near his parents, because it relaxes and weakens the 
moral fibers to be surrounded by too much love and 
care, and that whoever wishes to make a good man 
will not spare him in his youth but must often shock 
the rules of tenderness. He required that the goY- 



218 A VALIANT WOMAN 

ernor of a child should be a man of sound judgment 
and good morals, open and yielding in his nature 
rather than a man of mere learning. 

Montaigne set up for himself no lofty, unattain- 
able ideals. He thought that the value of the soul 
consists, not in its high flights, but in its well-or- 
dered regularity; that those who try to escape the 
limitations of human nature, make fools of them- 
selves, instead of transforming themselves into an- 
gels. He declared that these transcendental humors 
frightened him, as did precipitous, inaccessible 
heights, and that nothing so much annoyed him in 
the life of Socrates as his demons and ecstasies ; 
nothing in Plato seemed to him so human as that 
for which he was called divine ; nothing in Alexander 
so mortal as those fancies about his immortal origin. 
He believed that to enjoy loyally one's own human 
nature is the most absolute perfection to which we 
can attain; that no matter how high we may raise 
ourselves on stilts, we must still walk with our legs; 
and that we ought to be content with our conscience 
as that of a man, and not as that of an angel. 

Thus shone the light of knowledge in a lonely 
tower in the valley of Dordogne in the sixteenth 
century, and it does not pale even in the fierce white 
light of this electric age. Thoughtful men and 
women everywhere, to-day, are repeating what Mon- 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 219 

taigne said nearly four hundred years ago; and 
Rousseau repeated it in the eighteenth century. But 
because the fine balance of mind which gave wisdom 
and justice to Montaigne's thought was wanting in 
Rousseau, the unity of the white light was broken 
into beautiful prismatic coloring, essentially false, 
because it was never intended to be passed through 
such a prism. But the world is ungrateful to her 
sages and philosophers, and sits entranced at the 
feet of her artists and poets, learning her lessons by 
picture and song, giving an indestructible faith to 
what moves her feelings, — as if she had no rational 
mind capable of being moved at all. Rousseau knew 
how to clothe his ideas in the most seductive form; 
he knew how to move the feelings, being first moved 
himself, and if a work of art is a noble idea nobly 
expressed, Emile is a work of art and as such will 
continue to excite the admiration of its readers ; but 
it will no longer carry with it the conviction that it 
produced when it appeared. 

The eighteenth century was an age of skepticism: 
it had torn down old creeds without building up 
anything in their stead, and it had not really ad- 
vanced in knowledge beyond the Que sais-jef of 
Montaigne. D'Holbach, who represents the extreme 
attitude of enlightened negation, declares emphatic- 
ally that he would be just as much at a loss to tell 



220 A VALIANT WOMAN 

what the first stones, the first trees, the first lions, 
elephants, ants, or the first acorns came from, as to 
explain the origin of the human species; but that 
the human machine, wonderful as it is, did not seem 
to him beyond the powers of nature ; and that he was 
very much farther from a conception of its origin, 
when told that a pure spirit, having neither eyes, 
feet, hands, head, lungs, nor mouth, nor breath, 
made man by taking a little mud and breathing 
on it. 

Kant, who represents the most enlightened type 
of reason of the age, says, in the preface to his 
General History and Theory of the Heavens, that 
from a certain point of view, one might say, " Give 
me matter, and I will construct a world." After giv- 
ing his reasons for this statement with regard to the 
inanimate world, he asks pertinently, " But can we 
boast of such advantages with regard to the smallest 
plant or insect ? Are we able to say, 6 Give me 
matter, and I will show you how a caterpillar origi- 
nated ' ? Are we not stopped at the very first step 
in this investigation, by ignorance of the true inner 
organization of the living object, and by its marvelous 
complexity? And it should not be taken amiss if 
I venture to assert that the form of all the heavenly 
bodies, the cause of their movements, in short the 
origin of the whole present state of the universe. 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 221 

will be comprehended, before the origin of a single 
grass-blade or of a single worm will be plainly and 
completely known through mechanical principles." 

D'Holbach's and Kant's attitude to the riddle of 
the universe summarizes the state of scientific knowl- 
edge in the eighteenth century. Whether we have 
really advanced much farther is an open question; 
for, What is life? is still the unanswered enigma; 
but at any rate we have advanced somewhat in 
hypotheses. Gustave Le Bon is teaching us, first, 
that " matter formerly supposed indestructible is 
vanishing by the continual disassociation of the 
atoms which compose it. 

" 2. The products of the dematerialization of mat- 
ter constitute substances, intermediate by their prop- 
erties between ponderable bodies and the imponder- 
able ether: that is to say, between two worlds which, 
until now, science has entirely separated. 

" 3. That matter, formerly regarded as inert and 
unable to restore the energy with which it was fur- 
nished, is, on the contrary, a colossal reservoir of 
energy — inter-atomic energy — which it can spend 
without borrowing anything from outside. 

" 4. It is from inter-atomic energy, liberated dur- 
ing the disassociation of matter, that the majority 
of the forces of the universe result, — notably, elec- 
tricity and solar heat. 



222 A VALIANT WOMAN 

" 5. Force and matter are two different forms of 
one and the same thing. Matter represents a stable 
form of intra-atomic energy. Heat, light, electric- 
ity represent unstable forms of the same energy. 

" 6. In disassociating the atoms, that is, in de- 
materializing matter, we only change the stable form 
of energy, called matter, into these unstable forms, 
known as heat, light, electricity, etc. Matter, there- 
fore, is continually transforming itself into energy. 

" 7. The law of evolution applicable to living be- 
ings, equally applies to simple bodies : The chemical 
species are no more invariable than living species. 

" 8. Energy is no more indestructible than the 
matter from which it emanates." 

Darwin and his followers have established the 
theory of evolution, and although certain hypotheses, 
notably that of sexual selection, are no longer gen- 
erally accepted, and that of the inheritance of ac- 
quired characteristics is disputed by certain schools 
of naturalists, the essential ideas of the theory re- 
main unshaken, and form the basis of biological 
study. Therefore, we of the twentieth century are 
better prepared than Rousseau's contemporaries to 
know the utter falsity of the opening sentence of 
Emile: " Everything is good, when it leaves the 
hands of the Creator. Everything degenerates in 
the hands of man." 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 223 

This fundamental idea that all men are born 
equal and good, and that it is society and its con- 
ventions which degrade and deform men, is the ut- 
terly false note of this remarkable book. It leads 
logically to an absolute condemnation of the state, 
which, in Rousseau's mind, has no right to exist 
any longer. " These two words, country and citi- 
zen, ought to be effaced from modern language," is 
his dictum. As well efface the words father and 
son! It leads further to the declaration that 
" forced to combat either nature or social institu- 
tions, it is necessary to make either a man or a citi- 
zen, because we cannot make both at the same time." 
This is likewise a false conclusion. Civilization, 
which begins with social relations, is no more an- 
tagonistic to nature than is the toiling of bees for the 
hive — unless we mean by nature the freedom and 
irresponsibility of the beasts of the field ; but when we 
speak of human nature, we do not mean that, we 
mean the animal plus intelligence, out of which 
grows, with perfect naturalness, the social need of 
communication, and all the conventions which regu- 
late that communication. Civilization is the highest 
step that the human race has reached in its evolu- 
tion. It is not an individual but a collective result. 
It means first of all in the individual, self-control, 
recognition of the necessity of law, and the just val- 



224 A VALIANT WOMAN 

uation of intelligence as a source of well-being and 
happiness. An individual who has not reached in 
his evolution the degree of general development 
reached by his race, necessarily suffers from his in- 
feriority. The false belief that society is responsi- 
ble for the misery and degradation of these unfor- 
tunates, implies the belief that it can transform them 
into model citizens at its will. This is Rousseau's 
illusion, and it survives among us in the Utopian 
and socialistic dreams of radical reformers in all 
countries, and particularly in France, where, accord- 
ing to one of her brilliant writers, it has developed 
" the miraculous mentality, the messianic state of 
mind; and positive minds that laugh at Lourdes and 
its prodigies, would be very much surprised to have 
it shown them that they are expecting from the 
state political and social miracles far more aston- 
ishing than those of the Virgin of the Pyrenees. 
Among the masses, the belief has more and more 
deeply strengthened and rooted itself, that the state 
has only to will it, in order to change water into 
wine, brass into gold, bread into cake, and poverty 
into riches." 

Under the dominion of this false idea of society 
and its power, Rousseau builds up his educational 
ideal. He chooses for his example of it a child of 
the rich, because the poor need no education. Life 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 225 

itself makes men of them, and educates them heroic- 
ally. Since society restrains, Emile is to be allowed 
to develop in absolute freedom from any restraint, 
except the consequences of his own actions. To se- 
cure that freedom more perfectly, he is to be an 
orphan, under the sole guidance of a tutor, young, 
impressionable, sympathetic, and sensible. He is to 
live in the country and grow up a sturdy, robust 
little animal that can talk and ask questions. The 
child's education is to begin before he can speak or 
understand, but it is to be of a purely negative char- 
acter. He is to be taught nothing directly. He is 
to be neither punished nor reprimanded for any- 
thing he does ; and, until he is twelve years old, it 
does not make any difference whether he knows, as 
yet, his right hand from his left. At any rate, he 
has been happy, and " Is it nothing to be happy ? " 
asks Rousseau. " Is it nothing to leap, to play, 
to run all day long? In all his life he will never be 
so busy. Plato, in his Republic, which is thought 
to be so austere, brings up children only by feasts, 
games, songs, pastimes. It might be said that he 
has done everything, in teaching them to enjoy 
themselves very much." Emile's education proceeds 
under the same dominant idea that he is never to 
learn under the impression that he is learning; and 
at this juncture, Rousseau evokes the example of 



226 A VALIANT WOMAN 

his imaginary savage who, " obeying nobody, with 
no other law than his own will, is yet forced to rea- 
son at every act of his life. He does not make a 
move, he does not take a step, without having evoked 
the consequences. Thus the more his body is exer- 
cised, the more his mind is enlightened; his strength 
and his reason increase at the same time — aug- 
mented one by the other." 

We who know the real savage as he is, obedient 
to instincts rather than to reason, are not to be se- 
duced by this charming picture of his wisdom; but 
Rousseau's contemporaries believed in him ardently. 
There are many excellent lessons in Emile, many val- 
uable suggestions, now neglected, that it would be 
well to recall and put into practice, but it was this 
passionate appeal for freedom that gave the book 
its power. Wherever it was read, it loosed the in- 
fant's swaddling clothes, relaxed parental authority, 
broke the discipline of the schoolmaster, substituted 
persuasion for force, and introduced the vitalizing 
idea of the necessity for individual training in what 
most nearly concerns the daily life of man. But 
there is also much in it that is thoroughly unsound. 
Restif de la Bretonne in Monsieur Nicolas, speak- 
ing of the evil effects of the education which his 
brothers tried to give him, says that their ideas were 
an anticipation of Rousseau's, a fact which gave him 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 227 

an insurmountable aversion to Emile. He calls it 
the most dangerous book that has appeared in cen- 
turies, full of errors and mistaken views of things, 
especially in the study of Latin, to which Restif says 
he owed the development and lucidity of his ideas 
and the significance of words. He further charac- 
terizes Emile as a book vitiated by the character of 
Rousseau, — his taste for the paradoxical, his savage 
virtue, effect of an ardent and unbridled imagina- 
tion. Modern critics are much of the same opinion, 
but they have not pointed out just what particular 
error has been most persistent, and most fatal to the 
cause of education. 

Rousseau was of the opinion that it is much bet- 
ter for a child to remain entirely ignorant of what 
study and the sciences are, than to know them only 
to detest them ; — a very excellent idea which, un- 
fortunately, has never found any general acceptance ; 
while, on the other hand, its corollary, the idea of 
teaching through amusement to make him like them, 
has become so dominant a part of every received sys- 
tem of education, that we are in danger of losing the 
power to educate at all. 

This unfortunate idea received another direction 
from Pestalozzi, and culminated with Froebel. 

Pestalozzi, unlike Rousseau, was neither morbid 
nor self-centered. He was romantic, impressionable. 



228 A VALIANT WOMAN 

tenderly affectionate, full of trust and confidence in 
his fellow-men and utterly absorbed in one generous, 
noble idea — that of lifting the lower classes of his 
country out of wretched ignorance and painful servi- 
tude into enlightened independence. He believed 
that a rational system of education could effect this 
change. But his idea was vastly greater than his 
power of execution. He himself was almost entirely 
without learning; when he began to teach, he was 
unable even to read, write, or cipher correctly ; but 
what he lacked in knowledge, he amply supplied 
with a zeal, an untiring energy, a power of assimila- 
tion and growth, and an intuition into the child's 
needs that made him the most remarkable teacher of 
his day. In his valuable book, How Gertrude 
Teaches her Children (which, by the way, says noth- 
ing either of Gertrude or her children), we follow 
the history of the development of his educational 
idea, through his various experiments, failures, suc- 
cesses, and are astonished at the conjunction of so 
much rare, good sense with such childlike naivete. 
He has explained it himself. " With gray hair, I 
was still a child ; " and like a child he built castle 
after castle in the air, only to see them dissolve into 
clouds, when he woke from his dreams. He reports 
that he was called a fool, an idiot who never really 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 229 

knew what he did want, an insane man incapable of 
being helped until he was ashes. He carefully copies 
a most unflattering description of himself, written 
out by a schoolmaster who later became his disciple. 

"I had heard," writes the schoolmaster, "that he 
had once been seen going to Basel with his shoes 
tied with straw, because he had given away his 
buckles to a beggar. I had read Lienhard and 
Gertrude, believed in the buckles; but, that he was 
a fool, I could not get into my head. In short, I 
wished to see what he was like, and went to Burg- 
dorf . His first appearance astounded me. He came 
with his stockings hanging down, dusty, visibly dis- 
turbed by the call of another visitor. I cannot de- 
scribe what I felt at this moment. It was almost 
like pity mingled with wonder." 

It was the child again, utterly unconscious of ex- 
ternal appearance, wholly absorbed in the task at 
hand. The schoolroom showed the same disorder. 
The children were running about, talking, or help- 
ing each other at their tasks. Yet order was grow- 
ing out of this disorder. There was life here. A 
great idea was struggling for expression, and that 
idea was that all true education is primarily self-edu- 
cation. It is the same idea that underlies Rousseau's 
Emile and it will reappear in Froebel ; but Pestalozzi 



230 A VALIANT WOMAN 

works it out in a different way. Both men make 
their appeal to nature as authority, but they do not 
interpret her alike. 

It would be a curious inquiry to ferret out the real 
meaning attached to this word " nature," so glibly 
uttered by educators. With Rousseau it almost 
stands for an imaginary deity presiding over the 
phenomena of the universe; with Pestalozzi, it often 
means simply the way in which an individual is in- 
structed by experience; therefore, while Rousseau 
deems it an impertinence to interfere with nature, 
Pestalozzi feels that nature needs constant intelligent 
guidance, when the aim is rational education; and 
this guidance he gets from observation, feeling, and 
intuition. He gropes a long time in the darkness 
before finding the clew. He sees the peasant women 
of Appenzell, Switzerland, hang a large, brightly col- 
ored bird over the cradles of their infants, and when 
he sees the two- or three-weeks-old child stretching 
hands and feet towards the bright object, he has 
found his teacher in the mother, and writes in ecstasy : 

" The Appenzeller bird is to me what the bull was 
to the Egyptians, a sacred thing, and I have done 
all that I can to begin my teaching where the Ap- 
penzeller woman leaves off." He says that the 
child's education begins the first hour of its birth, 
and that, consequently, the mother is nature's ap- 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 231 

pointed teacher for the infancy and early years of 
the child's life; and a great thought comes to him, 
filling him with joyful enthusiasm. His task is to 
train mothers how to educate their children. He will 
put the means of elementary instruction into every 
peasant's hut in Switzerland. No child in all his be- 
loved fatherland shall grow up without the very best 
elementary training of his faculties, so that his 
further education may be in his own hands. He 
snaps his fingers at those who say that he will never 
be able to persuade mothers to take up this task, 
and answers exultantly : " It is not work ; it is play. 
It will rob them of no time. It will rather fill up 
the tediousness of thousands of oppressive moments. 
Father Bonifacius, who said of Zwingli's hopes in 
1517: fi It won't do. In all eternity, mothers will 
never read the Bible with their children, nor hear 
them say their morning and evening prayer,' found 
out, however, that they were doing it in 1522, and 
said : * I never would have believed it.' I am sure 
of my means, and I know and hope that at least be- 
fore I am buried, there will be, here and there, a 
Father Bonifacius in this matter who will say what 
the older one did, in 1522. I can wait. It will 
come." 

He waited all his life. It never did come. It 
has given no signs of coming yet. Dare we say it 



232 A VALIANT WOMAN 

never will come? that there never will be to any 
great extent of numbers, mothers who will realize the 
importance of the early impressionable 3^ears of 
childhood, and be willing to devote their time to their 
children's education? Pestalozzi felt that it was an 
insult to the mother-heart to doubt it, and with 
ardent enthusiasm he threw himself into the task of 
making a path for them through the wilderness of 
ignorance. He did not despair because he had not 
even a sharp ax to work with. He wielded his dull 
hatchet with such power that he cleared away for 
all time many brambles and fallen tree-trunks and 
let in light where there was darkness before; and 
though he died without seeing the dearest wish of his 
heart fulfilled, his labor was not lost. What was 
good in it still lives, though it slumbers from time 
to time. Even as I write, there is a new awakening 
of it in Italy, in the ideal mother-heart of which 
he dreamed, the heart of Mme. Montessori, and in 
these days of telegraph and telephone, the news of 
it circles the world; and for some time again, his 
ideas will revive in their original force. It takes 
the great teacher to recognize the great teacher, and 
it detracts in no wise from Mme. Montessori's power 
that she is able to give back Pestalozzi to the teach- 
ing world, and show that progress is as often look- 
ing backward as looking forward, and that he is 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 233 

poor indeed, that refuses to accept the inheritance 
of the past. 

Pestalozzi criticised the schools of his time as ma- 
chines which artificially suffocated in the child all 
the results of force and experience which Nature her- 
self had given him. He says that so far as he was 
able to judge of the higher instruction of the schools, 
it seemed to him to be brought to a perfection whose 
splendor dazzled his ignorance, as the sunlight daz- 
zles the mole. The secondary schools were also far 
above the plane of his knowledge, and in the ele- 
mentary schools he saw pupils and teachers work- 
ing with an ant-like diligence and an ant-like fidelity, 
the service and success of which he could not deny; 
but he concludes : " When I concentrate my atten- 
tion upon the character of the instruction as a whole, 
in relation to the actual and true condition of the 
mass of individuals to be taught, then it seems to 
me that the little which I can do, with all my igno- 
rance, is nevertheless infinitely more than that which 
I see the people really enjoying; and the more I 
thought about the latter, the more I found that what 
seems to flow for them in books like a mighty stream, 
evaporates in the village and in the schoolroom in a 
mist whose moist obscurity neither wets the people 
nor leaves them dry, and does not furnish- them with 
the advantages either of day or of night. I could 



234 A VALIANT WOMAN 

not conceal from myself the fact that school instruc- 
tion as really practiced was absolutely worthless to 
the great majority of the higher class and to the en- 
tire lower class." 

Not in books, therefore, will he look for help, 
but in man's five senses and the environment to 
which they answer. " As a physical being, you are 
nothing but your five senses," he writes ; " conse- 
quently the clearness or obscurity of your ideas must 
absolutely depend on the nearness or distance ac- 
cording to which all external objects touch these five 
senses. . . . Observation is the foundation of all 
knowledge. . . . Human power, common sense, 
mother-wit, are to me the only guarantees of the 
value of instruction. To the child, definite ideas are 
those only to whose clearness his own experience can 
contribute nothing more. Mushrooms spring up 
quickly on every dung-pile in rainy weather, and in 
the same rapid way, definitions, learned without ob- 
servation, beget a mushroom wisdom that quickly 
dies in the sunlight and is recognized by its poison- 
ous exhalations." 

He finds that the modes of interpreting the ex- 
periences of the senses may be reduced to three, 
namely: number, form, and language. 

1. How many objects and how many kinds of them 
do the eyes recognize? 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 235 

2. How do they look? that is, what is their form 
and outline? 

3. What are they called? 

Consequently, number, form, and language are 
the elementary means of instruction. Objects, not 
books, are put before the child for his inspection. 
He learns to count and reckon with pebbles or other 
small objects. His study of form begins with mak- 
ing straight lines, angles, and curves. Before he is 
taught to read, he must accurately reproduce all the 
sounds and combinations of sounds in his lan- 
guage ; and here the great teacher falls into certain 
extravagances that were the most easily imitated, 
and therefore spread the most rapidly, while the 
really great ideas which inspired him were never 
completely understood, because, as he said of him- 
self, he lacked the language to express to others 
what was clear to his own understanding. And that 
happens which always happens with an individual 
method. Living and fruitful with the great teacher, 
it becomes dead and sterile with the mere imitator. 

The best criticism of this ridiculous imitation, with 
which I am acquainted, is to be found in Jugender- 
innerungen ernes alten Marines by the German ar- 
tist, Wilhelm von Kiigelgen. Writing of the in- 
struction he received in childhood, he says that, as 
he remembers it, it was the Pestalozzi-Krugian 



236 A VALIANT WOMAN 

method (Krug was a disciple of Pestalozzi), " by 
which it mattered very much less what was learned, 
than the manner in which you learned it. Learning 
had become its own obj ect, and the formal culture 
of the understanding was to go hand in hand with 
special knowledge. The method of the older schools 
from practice to theory, from faith to insight, had 
been forsaken, and teachers were experimenting with 
a contrary method ; for nothing seemed more rational 
than to fashion the vessel before pouring anything 
into it. How dangerous in its consequences and con- 
trary to nature this method is, only few could under- 
stand then, because experience was wanting. The 
best intellects favored it, and to teach in the old way 
was to be considered a Philistine. So now, I had 
first to forget all that I had been taught, and begin 
all over again under the discipline of the new method. 
For to be able to read before thoroughly compre- 
hending one's language seemed untenable; and even 
language was worthless without the necessary infor- 
mation concerning each vocal and consonant sound. 
Therefore, there was not a little to be done, before 
it was possible to begin the real instruction in read- 
ing. Teacher and pupil opened wide their mouths 
before each other, the former to show in what posi- 
tion he placed his tongue, when he buzzed, hissed, 
hummed, or clicked, — the latter, in order to furnish 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 237 

to the master's searching eye the necessary means 
of inspecting the vocal organs. According as the 
tongue, teeth, lips, or palate were active, the con- 
sonants produced were named hiss, buzz, hum sounds ; 
lip, teeth, palate stop, etc. 

" So we buzzed, hummed, and hissed at each other 
like snakes, and were so much enamored of this oc- 
cupation that we thought nothing more insipid and 
old-fashioned than the spelling of the older school. 
I boasted of my buzzing sounds and palate stops to 
my friends who went to an ordinary school, and I 
did not at all mind being laughed at. Although in 
this way many things were understood, a firm foun- 
dation in orthography could not be laid without spell- 
ing and syllabification. We reckoned entirely in our 
heads. Written arithmetic was as yet out of the 
question. Nothing was accepted before it was seen 
into; and we could not learn the multiplication table 
by heart, until we had reckoned it all out and could 
see that it was really so. When we were in need 
of observation, our teacher used for that purpose 
blocks which he made himself, cutting them into dif- 
ferent sizes to furnish us the necessary proofs of 
our problems. So in our leisure hours we played 
and built with such reckoning blocks until arith- 
metical proportions were impressed upon us in every 
way. The size of numbers hovered before me in the 



238 A VALIANT WOMAN 

image of these blocks and not in figures. I reckoned 
according to imaginary blocks, an excellent method, 
that soon enabled me to do unusual problems for a 
child of my age. However, this was only the re- 
sult of practical training, for I had no natural gift 
for reckoning: it was only implanted in me, and 
vanished again like a mushroom that had grown 
over night. I do not know whether it was that I 
was weakened by too rapid growth, or whether my 
nature could bear only to a certain degree an ac- 
tivity to which it was not equal; at any rate, after 
a violent scene in the arithmetic class, our tutor 
dragged me by the collar to my father's study, 
loudly complaining that the stupid boy suddenly 
knew no longer how much one times one is. It 
was all too true! I had caught and confused my- 
self in a difficult problem in such a way that, all 
at once, I was unable to see clearly into the simplest 
of all numerical relations. And so it remains. I 
formed an invincible repugnance to mental arithme- 
tic, was not tormented with it any longer, but was 
introduced to the mechanism of cipher reckoning, 
in which, however, I made very little progress. 

" Meanwhile Latin was begun; history, geography, 
natural history carried on ; yet, to my shame, I must 
confess that at that time it was all one to me what 
the Romans called their tables, whether mensa or 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 239 

otherwise, whether Sardanapalus had been a weak- 
ling or a hero, whether the earth was a plane, a ball, 
or a triangle, and whether the fishes suckled their 
young or brought them up on a bottle. In a word, 
all desire for knowledge was dead in me, and I 
would much rather have drawn the whole day long, 
or done some other practical thing from which some- 
thing would have resulted." 

Pestalozzi would have wept heart-broken over such 
a report in his name. Assuredly, Froebel would do 
the same thing, could he revisit us and see what we 
have done, and are doing, to education in his name. 

Froebel owed very much to Pestalozzi, with whom 
he spent two years. He speaks of this experience 
as being " glorious," but he thought inner unity and 
correlation were lacking in Pestalozzi's work. Like 
Pestalozzi, he lays the supreme stress on the child's 
creative self-activity, and believes the mother is by 
nature the best and truest teacher of its earliest 
years. Like Pestalozzi, he pays his tribute to the 
Appenzell bird, swinging above the infant's cradle, 
and feels that the senses are the source of knowledge 
and that joyous spontaneity in exercising them is 
nature's method of teaching, and that we should do 
our best to imitate it. Like Pestalozzi, he believes 
firmly in the educational value of manual labor, just 
as Locke had believed in it something like one hun- 



240 A VALIANT WOMAN 

dred and fifty years before them. Like Pestalozzi, 
he was called an " old fool " as he played with the 
children on the village green; and like his great con- 
temporary, he cared little what the world said of him 
so long as his children loved and understood him. 
But Froebel, unlike Pestalozzi, was a mystic. While 
object teaching, with Pestalozzi, exists for the sake 
of the object itself, in order that it may truly and 
definitely speak to the child as it really appears, 
with Froebel the object is not an end in itself, but 
a means to a larger end which he defines as the con- 
sciousness of " the unity of the universe, which 
unity is God." With him the whole aim of instruc- 
tion is not knowledge, but spiritual power; by which 
he means recognition of " God in humanity, human- 
ity in God; God in nature, nature from God," and 
then, " the synthesis between humanity and nature, 
the recognition of the tri-unity which makes up the 
result of this connection or unifying of oppo sites." 
It has a lofty sound, this mystical formula; but 
when the mind tries to grasp its meaning, it seems 
to resolve itself into the familiar theory of panthe- 
ism. But Froebel energetically denied that he was 
a pantheist. " The pantheistic view," he said, " is 
outgrown, and we have nothing more to do with an 
inseparable Unity, but with Trinity. Trinity has 
become the corner-stone which the people have re- 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 241 

jected, because they do not understand it. The 
triple Unity of God is obvious in all His works to 
eyes that can see. Have we not always and every- 
where a trinity of contrasts and their intermedium? 
. . . But I do not say, as the Pantheist does, that 
the world is God's body, that God dwells in it as in 
a house. But the spirit of God dwells and lives in 
nature, produces, fosters, and unfolds everything, as 
the common life-principle. In like manner, the spirit 
of God dwells in His work, and fosters and pre- 
serves it." 

This " dwelling in nature " and " dwelling in the 
world " is a distinction without a difference, which 
it is unnecessary to insist upon, since even the most 
devoted Froebelians do not hesitate to admit that 
their master is profound to obscurity. To the ordi- 
nary intelligence a " triple Unity " is no clearer than 
the expression of a one-legged quadruped: it is sim- 
ply a contradiction in terms. Certainly, we may 
speak of the universe as a unity in the sense of 
there being an interrelation of all its parts, so that 
nothing exists entirely isolated; and this is evidently 
what Froebel means, for he says that unity is not 
sameness; but this thought is neither new, being so 
obvious, nor has it that widely suggestive, closely 
personal and stimulating character which can make 
it a great vitalizing force to the ordinary intellect. 



242 A VALIANT WOMAN 

Neither the God of the old Pantheism nor that of the 
neo-pantheism of Froebel is the all-seeing, all-loving 
Father to whom the weary and the suffering turn 
for rest and consolation. The belief that the divine 
is in us may flatter and sustain us in the sunshine; 
but in the hours of pain and desolation, we repeat the 
cry of agony that rang out from the cross, and we 
know that we are human, not divine, and that we 
need help from some source that is higher than our- 
selves. 

Froebel's persistency in regarding all objects as 
mere symbols of spiritual truth led him to declare 
that unless the kindergarten work which he originated 
resulted in this consciousness of unity with God, and 
the subjection of the senses to the spirit, it was 
absolutely valueless. All other education was to him 
but whitewashed barbarism. All the gifts and occu- 
pations of the kindergarten were planned to lead the 
child's intellect to his idea of the universe. These 
gifts were the signs of his ideas and he never doubted 
their value in this direction, for he said that God had 
directed him in his plan. " The world of crystals " 
proclaimed to him, he said, " in distinct and unequiv- 
ocal terms, the laws of human life." 

Many attempts, unfortunately not successful, have 
been made to give to Froebel's symbolism a clear, in- 
telligible form, and Froebelians as gravely discuss 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 243 

" the psychology of the ball," as the professor of 
the Grand Academy of Logado discussed the project 
of extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers; but their 
grave assertions, to quote a clever mathematician, 
" have no meaning interpreted in terms of external 
reality." 

" The most pregnant thought which arose in me 
at this period," writes Froebel of his youth, " was 
this : All is unity, all rests in unity, all springs from 
unity ; strives for and leads up to unity, and returns 
to unity at last. This striving in unity and after 
unity is the cause of the several aspects of life." 

When we closely examine this thought so preg- 
nant to him that he felt it ought to be equally preg- 
nant to others, and therefore deserved to be the su- 
preme aim of education, we find it singularly obscure 
and contradictory. In the first place, if all is unity, 
there is no necessity for striving after what already 
exists. If everything rests in unity, there can be 
no strife, for strife contradicts the idea of rest. 
Again, to return to what has never been abandoned 
is another contradiction ; and lastly, the admission of 
several aspects of life as a result of the strife in 
unity and after unity is really an assertion that 
there is no unity in unity. In short, far from be- 
ing pregnant to the ordinary mind, the thought is 
difficult and obscure. Its pregnancy to Froebel lay 



244 A VALIANT WOMAN 

in the fact that he had created the hypothesis of 
unity, and seeing contradictions to it everywhere, 
it became the exhaustless problem and task of his 
life to solve these contradictions, which he did by 
Jhis ingenious law of opposites and their reconcilia- 
tion. Even in language he carries his symbolism so 
far as to say that the vowels express unity and the 
consonants individuality; and he gives lists of words 
to the sound of which he attaches fancied manifes- 
tations of spirituality. His search for contrasts and 
connections was a never ceasing well of refreshment 
and strength to him, and he would fain lead all men 
to quaff of its waters ; and though he founded no 
philosophical system, he had wonderful flashes of 
intuition that give him a place among philosoph- 
ical thinkers. " Force and matter," he says, antici- 
pating Le Bon, " are inseparably one. ... It is 
impossible to think one, without thinking the other." 
He sees that the basis of ethics is the need of inner 
harmony with the highest good known to us, and that 
any other incentive is ignoble, and says: 

" We ought to lift and strengthen human nature, 
but we degrade and weaken it when we seek to lead 
it to good conduct by means of a bait, even if the 
bait beckons to a future world ; when we use even the 
most spiritual and external incentive for a better life, 
and leave undeveloped the inner, self-active forces 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 245 

which in every human being prompt the representa- 
tion of a pure humanity." 

But his one great service to the cause of educa- 
tion is that he taught the world as no educational 
reformer, not even his great master, Pestalozzi, has 
ever so successfully done, the unrecognized truth 
that a child's education is his own individual work, 
and that the teacher's only business is to stimulate 
him to educate himself. He believes with his great 
predecessor that inner growth is the only real 
growth. 

" To stir up, to animate, to strengthen the pleas- 
ure and power of the human being to labor uninter- 
ruptedly at his own education has become and al- 
ways remained the fundamental principle and aim of 
my educational work." 

He is so firmly persuaded of the regenerative 
power of self-activity that he declares: 

" Freedom cannot be bestowed upon us. God 
himself cannot bestow it upon us ; since it must be 
the product of our moral and intellectual unfetter- 
ing, which it is possible to attain only by self-activ- 
ity." 

He thinks little of " spacious schoolrooms as 
such," and says " they are not sufficient, if the good 
ventilation has taken the place of higher spiritual 
life. Airy, bright schoolrooms are a great, a pre- 



246 A VALIANT WOMAN 

cious boon, worthy the daily gratitude of teacher and 
pupil, but alone, they are not sufficient." 

He would not have the child spoiled or pampered 
in any way. His food must be " extremely simple, 
and eaten only when hungry, not for the sake of 
eating." . . . His " clothes in form and cut and 
color should never become an object in themselves, 
else they will soon make him frivolous and vain." 
The individuality of each child must be sacredly re- 
spected, and neither bribes nor punishments are to 
be used to influence it. Play is the child's natural 
activity: judiciously directed, it becomes discipline, 
creative activity, education. Forced learning is use- 
less learning, for it is never assimilated, therefore 
quickly forgotten; only what interests the child and 
finds in his mind some point of attachment will not 
perish but will enrich the child's knowledge. 

" As a state machine," says Froebel, speaking of 
his work as an innovation, " I should have been en- 
gaged in cutting out and modeling other state ma- 
chines. But I only wished to train up free thinking, 
independent men." 

Although he believed that the teaching of the 
young child is particularly woman's work, and like 
Pestalozzi wished to put into the hands of every 
mother the means of training her infant properly, 
he had no sympathy at all with the movement for 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 247 

the higher education of women, begun in his day. 
He felt that it was simply the expression of personal 
ambition, not love of knowledge,; — a wish to escape 
the narrower and more intimate duties of the fire- 
side. He believed that these very experiences are 
the real education of women, and not the cramming 
of facts and theories. He was not at all optimistic 
about the immediate success of his kindergarten 
work, feeling himself misunderstood, and unable to 
explain clearly just what he wished to do. His 
warm friend and disciple, Baroness B. von Maren- 
holz-Biilow, to whom we owe the most intimate knowl- 
edge of his personality, said of him : " It was im- 
possible to hold him for a long time to one train of 
thought," — a rather singular defect in a philosopher 
whose hobby was unity ; and she adds, elsewhere, 
" But even genius is subject to error, and often car- 
ries its fundamental thought to its logical result in 
a one-sided manner, and from this liability, Froebel 
cannot be said to be free." 

The real truth is that the best of Froebel's educa- 
tional ideas are those of the self-educated man, as 
were Pestalozzi's ; and as such, they are perfectly ad- 
mirable and correct; but his methods are extremely 
artificial, in spite of the fact that he tried to re- 
duce the experiences of his own self-culture to a sys- 
tem. The proof of their artificiality is that he him- 



248 A VALIANT WOMAN 

self is a most admirable example of the utter 
unnecessariness of his own educational methods 
which were developed in his maturity, after fifteen 
years of constant meditation. He wrote of his own 
work as a schoolboy that he learned to repeat his 
lessons in physical geography like a parrot, — 
" speaking much and knowing nothing " ; that all 
the teaching he had on the subject had not the 
slightest connection with real life, and that as for 
his spelling, he never knew with what subject it was 
connected, " it hovered in the air," where, by the 
way, it continues to hover, persistently refusing to 
come down and settle anywhere. He reported of his 
work in geometry that it was " piecemeal patch- 
work"; yet if we may judge a tree by its fruits, 
his early education, however unsatisfactory it may 
have been, did not stifle his self-activity. Can we 
say the same of the fruits of his educational life 
work, — the kindergarten? 

In his admirable book, Educational Reformers, 
written with beautiful clearness and inspired by 
generous enthusiasm, R. H. Quick approaches the 
name of Froebel in a spirit of distrust, ostensibly not 
so much in the great reformer as in himself. He 
speaks of Froebel as one whom he fails to under- 
stand completely, who seems to have access to a 
world shut out from ordinary mortals, and about the 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 249 

nature of whose visions we hesitate at times. He 
confesses that he is conscious when writing about him 
of wanting the " spring," because he is unable to 
determine whether his utterances at times are really 
the expression of deep truth or absolutely meaning- 
less. 

It took great courage in the face of the excessive 
enthusiasm awakened by the kindergarten movement 
to express so clearly some years ago so vital a criti- 
cism of Froebel. After several generations of ex- 
perience in the work in Germany, and two genera- 
tions in the United States, it requires no courage 
whatever, but merely a sense of justice and a love 
of truth, to repeat the criticism in a more unequivo- 
cal form. We read the prophecies of the new mil- 
lennium which was to follow in education the adoption 
of this great innovation, and we record with chagrin 
that they have utterly failed. 

" When a few generations shall have passed 
through such schools," writes one, " teachers will 
fully comprehend Froebel's prophetic revelation of 
the unity between cooperation and perfect individ- 
uality, and the war between individualism and social- 
ism shall be at an end." 

The fact is that the war was never so bitter, 
never seemingly so remote from its end, as at the 
present day. Froebel recorded it as his " deepest 



250 A VALIANT WOMAN 

conviction that the time must come when the chasm 
between things and the more or less abstract concep- 
tion of things will be filled up," that " philosophy has 
hitherto been without the true foundation which nat- 
ural science alone can afford it, and that it is just 
this foundation which my method of education is to 
supply." But the philosopher has always endeav- 
ored to include in his philosophy all that is known of 
physical science in his time, and Kant's superiority 
rests on the very fact that he took into account the 
recognized scientific beliefs of his day. However, 
the latest addition to philosophical thought, the work 
of Henri Bergs on, instead of confirming FroebePs 
prophecy, attempts to show that intuition may pene- 
trate further the mystery of life than pure intelli- 
gence which works in matter for practical purposes, 
and that these intuitions are as yet but transitory 
flashes which philosophy ought to record; and that 
" the more she advances, the more she perceives that 
intuition is the very spirit itself and in a certain sense 
life itself." He adds that we may pass from intui- 
tion to intelligence, but never from intelligence to 
intuition. 

The extraordinary interest which Bergson's work 
has excited all over the thinking world will probably 
result in an attempt to fill the chasm between the 
known and the unknown by intuition, that is, by non- 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 251 

scientific methods ; and it is not amiss here to call at- 
tention to Ribot's keen remark on methods in his well- 
known Psychologie des Sentiments. 

" It is not concerning the object pursued, but ac- 
cording to the method employed, that love of science 
may take a false route. 

" Scientific mysticism consists in replacing regu- 
lar proceedings by intuition and divination ; in ex- 
pecting everything from an interior revelation, a 
supernatural illumination; in substituting the sub- 
jective for the objective, faith for demonstration and 
verification, individual validity for universal valid- 
ity. Certainly, it would be a gross error to pretend 
that intuition and divination have not played a capi- 
tal role in the discoveries of savants. They are at 
the origin of nearly all of them, and there is a mo- 
ment in which scientific and artistic creation coincide 
in their psychological conditions ; but no savant 
worthy of the name ever confuses the vision of a 
truth with the demonstration of a truth. He does 
not consider it scientific until he has furnished the 
proofs of it. Mysticism is the reintegration in sci- 
ence of the love of the marvelous, and the illusory 
desire to act upon nature without previous researches, 
without trouble, without work. 

" The intellectual emotion has, therefore, two 
principal morbid forms: doubt, which in its last 



252 A VALIANT WOMAN 

term ends in dissolution, and mysticism, which is onty 
a deviation whose essence consists in substituting 
imaginary proceedings for logical ones." 

The twentieth century is peculiarly a prey to 
these two morbid forms of intellectual emotion, — a 
doubt ending in dissolution which we flatter ourselves 
is tolerance and breadth of view, and mysticism 
which is the expression of the mental hunger to re- 
solve doubt into certainty regarding the unknown 
in which we are submerged; and these two mental 
states are precisely the negation of what Froebel 
hoped for the race, although he himself, according 
to Baroness von Marenholz-Biilow, had a " mind liv- 
ing entirely under the power of intuition." But he 
is himself a striking example of his law of contrasts, 
for it is in the concrete that he worked, it was the 
senses that he trusted, it was fact that he sought; 
but he sought it in order to transfigure it into what 
it was not. To him the material world was only a 
symbol of the spiritual one, and the only use of edu- 
cation he believed to lie in leading the child to recog- 
nize the world as a symbol and God as the ultimate 
cause of all things. To one who said that his law of 
unity was nothing but an empty phrase, he replied: 

" But if you think that my educational materials 
are useful, this cannot be because of their exterior, 
which is as simple as possible, and contains nothing 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 253 

new. The worth of them is to be found exclusive^ 
in their application, that is, in the method in which 
I use them. But this method consists in the appli- 
cation of that law which you characterize as an 
' empty phrase.' The whole meaning of my educa- 
tional method rests upon this law alone. The method 
stands or falls with the recognition or non-recogni- 
tion of it. Everything that is left is mere material, 
the working of which proceeds according to the law, 
and without that law would not be practicable." 

Again he asserts : " The keystone of the kinder- 
garten activity is the transformation of material, and 
therefore the perception of the mutual connectedness 
of the various solid forms, their derivation from one 
another, and the connection of all with the primary 
unity of space." 

It would be entirely unnecessary to insist upon the 
fact that however valuable this keystone may have 
seemed in Froebel's eyes, it has been absolutely with- 
out significance in practical application, for the sim- 
ple reason that like all symbolism it is purely arti- 
ficial. The dreamer who sees in the leaping flames 
of the chimney fire curious shapes of castles and ani- 
mals, and follows their transformation in delight, in- 
terpreting them by fantastic tales which he creates, 
is unable to point them out to another eye and thus 
invest them with the weird charm that they have for 



254 A VALIANT WOMAN 

his own. Nor is it particularly desirable that he 
should be able to do this, if he is to insist that he 
sees real castles and real animals instead of the crea- 
tions of his excited fancy. Froebel was this fireside 
dreamer, and he looked for a great spiritual awaken- 
ing as the result of his method of seeing visions. 
Has it come? Were we ever farther away from it 
than to-day? He looked for a great increase of self- 
activity, independence, and pure happiness. Can 
we find that pure happiness anywhere? As I write, 
there come reports from Germany that 1000 youths 
kill themselves in that country every year, and that 
Prussia alone reports this year 731 suicides of stu- 
dents. An inquiry into 1215 recent cases shows 
that 37% were caused by fear of punishment or 
fear of not passing examinations. " The tendency 
of family training destroys discipline," says one au- 
thority, " and pessimistic writers are the favorite 
authors of the young." 

But Froebel's method has for its basic theory 
that the child should be governed as little as possible, 
so that his individuality may not be warped or de- 
stroyed. Play is his element ; therefore, let him learn 
in play. 

Question the young as to what they recall of the 
kindergarten, and they will report it as a delightful 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 255 

place where they thought that they were doing as 
they pleased, yet were doing exactly what the teacher 
wished them to do. They remember the attention 
given to neatness and cleanliness, because of the re- 
wards and punishments attending neatness and clean- 
liness ; the little stars pasted close to their names 
on the blackboard ; or the bright red ring marked on 
the palm of the hand, of which they were taught to 
be as proud as a young savage of his tattooed face. 
They remember the feast day once a week, when they 
all brought cake and cream and ate together, — or the 
Christmas tree for whose presents each one con- 
tributed a quarter on the week preceding the holi- 
days. They remember, too, the seats of honor next 
the teacher, assigned for good behavior or superior 
work, and the row of chairs in disgrace given to 
those who had not polished their shoes or had come 
with dirty faces. They recall the little excursions 
in park and field ; but when we sum up the result, we 
know that it is pitifully remote from that which Froe- 
bel desired and often exactly the contrary of it, 
and that it does not begin to equal in value the 
memories and training of a real home in which the 
mother with the intuition of love answers the child's 
spontaneous needs, and gives him real liberty, not 
a feigned one. In short, it is perilously like raising 



256 A VALIANT WOMAN 

chickens by the incubator method, in preference to 
the natural one; and those who really understand 
children feel keenly its defects. 

" The whole inner life of a child," writes Fanny 
Lewald in her autobiography, " is a half -waking. 
As the child passes its first month in a half -sleep, so 
in like manner it continues mentally for a long time 
through its childhood in this condition. All its 
thinking is wonder, guessing; its whole existence a 
spoken or an inaudible question; and the natural in- 
clinations of children, together with their manner of 
development, are so different in each one of them, 
that we must let them quietly go their own way, un- 
less some serious appearance makes it necessary to 
anticipate their gradual awakening in self-examina- 
tion and self-knowledge. The more a child is let 
alone in peace, the more surely it finds what is suit- 
able to itself." 

Froebel would have been the very first to give 
his entire approval to this statement; yet in his 
name we break ruthlessly into this slow-going dream- 
life of the child to trouble him with our invidious 
distinctions of mental power and external appear- 
ance, stimulating or shaming him by rewards and 
punishments, substituting for his free inventions and 
natural play our artificial symbolic games, in which 
if he could be conscious of the symbol, which fortu- 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 257 

nately he is not, he would hate the play just as he 
hates medicine even when it is sugar-coated. And 
we have still another sin against children to an- 
swer for in weakening them physically and mentally 
by too early hothouse culture. It is now more than 
forty years since Preyer, in his well-known book, -Die 
Seele des Kindes, called the attention of his readers 
to the fact that the continual occupation of young 
children on fine work like paper-pricking, threading 
beads, card-sewing, etc., as practiced in German 
kindergarten schools, although highly recommended, 
is undoubtedly very harmful to the eyes, even in the 
best light. But we have given no heed to the warn- 
ing, preferring to pay for our strings of beads and 
bright worsted-work samples with the most precious 
of physical gifts — a keen, clear vision ; for are 
there not oculists and spectacles, when the sight 
fails? 

There is yet another direction in which evil, not 
good, has come to us in Froebel's name, and yet, as 
in other cases, this evil is one which he would have 
deeply deplored; nay, more, it is one against which 
his whole method was intended to be a safeguard. 
The evil is the loss of initiative in the pupil by mak- 
ing amusement the chief incentive to study; and it 
has passed from the kindergartens to the upper 
grades and high schools. The first manifestation of 



258 A VALIANT WOMAN 

the evil is in reversing the role of pupil and teacher, 
by concentrating the attention on the latter instead 
of on the former, and giving him the active and 
the pupil the passive role,, — the very thing against 
which Froebel raised a cry. The main question in 
educational circles is no longer, What is the pupil 
doing? but, What is the teacher doing to make his 
subject attractive? Can he hold the attention of his 
pupils? Can he make his recitation as interesting as 
a ball game or a vaudeville performance? The real 
fact is that it is the teacher who is being educated 
at the expense of the pupil, who is often a mere spec- 
tator at a clever performance. It is the teacher 
who grips the subject closely in its unattractive 
nakedness, and then exercises his imagination in 
clothing it in an attractive garb for his pupils. He 
carries his ingenuity to the most ludicrous lengths 
in order to avoid calling things by their right names, 
lest the pupil should not enjoy them. Go into any 
of our primary schools, and you will find young 
women teaching fractions by calling the circles which 
they make on the blackboard pies, and dividing them 
into slices or pieces of pie; because the child is sup- 
posed to be more familiar with the pie than with 
the circle, and we must proceed from the known to 
the unknown, joining our circle apperceptively to the 
child's agreeable recollections of the pie. Our fear 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 259 

that the child might not like the circle unless we as- 
sure him that it is a pie, is akin to Nick Bottom's 
apprehension for the ladies who are to be assured 
that the lion is no real lion, but only Snug, the joiner. 
In many of our educational journals we may read 
enthusiastic descriptions of this sort of teaching, 
and I once saw it gravely asserted that subtraction 
may be delightfully taught by taking pieces of chalk, 
giving them children's names: Clarence, Theodora, 
Alberta, Peruna (Susan and James and John exist 
no longer), and sending some of them to church and 
keeping some of them home. This puerile effort to 
avoid the abstract by insisting on the concrete is a 
deliberate extinction of the power to think, and lies 
at the root of the pupil's helplessness when he comes 
to the problems of pure geometry and must think in 
lines and circles instead of in puddings and pies. It 
is high time that common sense should supplant 
method, and that directness, not circumlocution, 
should be recognized as the most effective way of ar- 
riving at truth. Instead of calling six white marks 
on a blackboard, soldiers, pieces of pie, or children, 
or trees, let them appear as they are, — white lines 
to which other white lines may be added or from 
which they may be taken away. In this case, the 
child's attention is not distracted by a mental image 
forced upon him sometimes to the exclusion of the 



260 A VALIANT WOMAN 

subject to be taught. Besides, the white lines are 
just exactly as concrete as lines, as when they are 
called what they are not, and the simplicity of the 
reality makes it far more effective than the image- 
making. 

When the teacher himself wishes to learn any- 
thing, he always learns it in this simple way. He 
does not start playing with his subject, dance all 
round it, cover it over with beautiful flowers ; he 
goes straight up to it and takes hold of it, rough 
or smooth. He does not concern himself at all with 
its relation to anything else. He gives a clear field 
to this one subject which he wishes to know. It is 
only later, when the subject stands out distinctly be- 
fore him, that he seizes it anew in all its relations to 
what he already knows, and feels it in harmony with 
his previous knowledge. He calls this harmony cor- 
relation, but he never dreamed of beginning with it. 
When he began studying the elm trees of the city 
park, he did not think it necessary to correlate them 
with the One Hoss Shay, nor study the American 
Revolution to correlate them with the Washington 
Elm at Cambridge. That is like going round the 
world to get into your neighbor's back yard: and 
alas ! in education at present, that is the fashionable 
method of getting there ! By no means are you to 
climb over the fence and jump down, or even to get 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 261 

in through the back gate, or go around by the front. 
You would be getting there too soon, and that is not 
the sole object of your activity. You are to get 
there with the universe in your vest-pocket. 

We are witnesses of such tragi-comic getting there, 
or rather never getting there, that it might be just 
as well to try to teach the children as we teach our- 
selves, and save their time and their intelligence from 
utter loss, instead of attempting to boil the universe 
in a tea-pot and serve them the drink piping hot. 
Let the teacher not be afraid of being called old-fash- 
ioned. There are some things that will always be 
in fashion, though they are older by far than the 
Pyramids. The sun will always rise in the east and 
set in the west. An old hen will always beat the 
best incubator in raising a brood of chickens. The 
best way to learn to swim will always be to throw 
yourself into the water instead of going through the 
motions on land; and the best teacher will always be 
the one who puts as little as possible of himself be- 
tween the pupil and his subject and inspires him 
with a desire to work it out, and not to play with it. 

All real scholars will tell you that they have been 
self-educated, but that among their teachers, the 
best were those who were an inspiration to them 
through their ripeness and wisdom, making learning 
really appear their ornament and staff of life in- 



262 A VALIANT WOMAN 

stead of being mere hide-bound pedantry. But these 
self-educated men when turned educational reformers 
have always seemed to distrust what really made them 
what they are, and have tried to introduce some- 
thing new which they felt would supply this self- 
training or incite to it, and hence have often fallen 
into error. They are like the tender father whose 
shrewdness and untiring perseverance and struggles 
with difficulties have made him a man of power, but 
who, not recognizing the fact, would spare his son 
all the trials which he himself has undergone, and 
therefore makes a mollycoddle out of him. So by 
our efforts to amuse and interest flagging attention, 
by our zeal to smooth away educational difficulties, 
by our desire to surround the young with all the 
comforts and luxuries of modern civilization, we are 
building elegant hot-houses for mollycoddles. But 
it is fearless men and women, not mollycoddles, that 
modern civilization demands, — men and women who 
can endure the buffets of adversity as well as pass 
unspoiled through triumph and success. 

Among the causes of suicide among the German 
youth were the most trifling things, — a petulant 
word, a box on the ear, a wish refused ! What a se- 
vere comment upon family training, where the child is 
master or is reasoned with, coaxed, and bribed, instead 
of being taught the wholesome discipline of obedi- 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 263 

ence ! What a deplorable sign of the absence of any 
deep affection for home and family ! But this must 
naturally result from the child's too early separa- 
tion from mother and home and from its being taught 
to find its pleasures in the society of other children, 
or when it has no fixed habitation around which its 
young memories may entwine. This is particularly 
the case with children in America. The city direct- 
ory of St. Louis for 1912 reports 181,000 changes 
of residence in the past year. That means that 
55% of its population are practically migratory, 
and this is probably the condition of affairs in most 
of our great cities. But a young child is not trans- 
planted with impunity any more than a young plant. 
Speaking of the length of time during which the 
servants of her father's household remained in the 
family, and of the absence of continual change of 
place during her childhood, Fanny Lewald says : 

" That was what gave our life a firm foothold. 
We were not obliged to accustom ourselves to con- 
stantly new impressions. Our thoughts were not 
drawn away from one thing to another. These peo- 
ple were our very own; and just as the servants 
about us remained the same, so our external surround- 
ings were changed but once, in my eleventh year, 
when father and mother took us on a little journey 
to Memel. An annual change for a summer resi- 



264 A VALIANT WOMAN 

dence was not considered necessary in our day, and 
either my mother or one of us children must be dan- 
gerously ill, before my parents would have consented 
to a separation. They had bound themselves to 
each other for love, and lived in the good old faith 
that men and women marry to be as much together 
as possible. This persistency of environment had 
for us — or, to limit this statement personally, had 
for me — the great advantage of making me feel 
really at home in our little world ; and I do not believe 
that children in the present fashionable migratory 
life of families find in their travels and changes of 
summer and winter residence the slightest compensa- 
tion for that intimate home feeling which was ours. 
For if, in the general development of humanity, it 
is indispensable to know a thing intimately, in order 
to understand it perfectly, then for the development 
of a child this is the case in a still higher degree, 
since the child even under the quietest conditions of 
life, daily, nay, hourly, is assimilating such a quan- 
tity of new ideas, has so many new experiences to 
make, and as his organism must be so much more 
receptive and excitable than that of the grown per- 
son, he should be guarded from sudden and frequent 
changes instead of being exposed to them. 

" I can never suppress a feeling of pity when in 
traveling I meet children whose parents through self- 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 265 

love are dragging them about with them. Now ex- 
cited, now worn out, here pampered and praised be- 
yond measure by strangers and friends, and there 
repulsed by parents and maids when it is inconvenient, 
for what they are allowed to do at home, the poor 
little creatures find no comfort anywhere. And now 
and then when I took the pains to ask the little 
things what they had lately seen in their travels, 
they remembered nothing but some triviality which 
they might have seen just as well, and much more 
easily, at home. A child, in the care of some hon- 
est nurse, picking buttercups on some grassy spot 
or playing with a little dog, is being a thousand 
times better brought up and is learning immeasurably 
more things of real value for life, than the little crea- 
ture who is being led up and down in a strange city 
to-day, now blinking with stupid little eyes at some- 
thing it is told is the sea, and to-morrow trailed 
around in a zoological garden in a strange city, 
among faces entirely new to it. However, there is 
one fortunate thing for children in their instinctive 
impulse of self-preservation which guards them 
against a surfeit of new impressions and holds them 
simply to what is suitable for them. A couple of 
eight- to nine-year-old boys with whom in my pres- 
ence an effort was made to make them admire a ris- 
ing balloon, persisted in amusing themselves with a 



266 A VALIANT WOMAN 

dog swimming in a ditch at their feet; and a three- 
year-old little girl in the harbor of Hamburg, when 
asked to look at the ships, cried out : 6 Oh, the lit- 
tle red stockings ! ' She was looking at a clothes- 
line on the shore, on which the washing was hung, 
and found her pleasure in the little stockings which 
were about the size of her own." 

There is an encouraging note in this concluding 
observation which makes us feel that perhaps in the 
kindergarten, too, we are not permitted to harm the 
children as much as we would like, because their in- 
stinct of self-preservation saves them from us; and 
the trivialities which they carry away in their memory 
are not seriously damaging. Let us take heart, too, 
with regard to the words " pedagogical " and " psy- 
chological," fearing them no longer. These words 
cover a multitude of educational follies for which per- 
haps the so-called " teachers' institute " and " teach- 
ers' meeting " are in a great measure responsible. 
The habit of perpetually talking about teachers and 
teaching, and the natural weariness resulting, leads 
inevitably either to talking for the sake of talking, 
or to a desire for change to avoid mental stagnation ; 
and theories, experiments, and reports of them con- 
tinue to arise, cause their momentary flutter, then 
pass into oblivion, unless they become fixed by the 
erection of buildings for their propagation. " When 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 267 

I don't know what to say, I holler," said a frank 
Methodist minister. There is a great amount of 
" hollering " in the teacher's profession, for the self- 
same reason, only it goes by another name. It calls 
itself psychological pedagogy. It is only the true 
mother and the real poet who can reenter child- 
hood and feel its joys and pains, its wonder and 
curiosity, in their integrity, and love is the secret 
of the one and genius of the other: but they lay 
down no set principles and found no methods. Here 
and there the sympathy of the mother or the memory 
and insight of the genius are given to a teacher,— 
for the real teacher, like the poet, is born, not made, 
— and then we have an illumination in the teacher's 
calling; but often that which made its brilliancy and 
effectiveness, as in Froebel, is purely a personal gift, 
something wholly incommunicable, and the same 
method directed by another personality is an abso- 
lute failure. The great mistake that method-mon- 
gers make is to believe in the method and not in the 
teacher; and to fail to see that one man's success is 
often another man's failure. 

However, laying aside all questions of method or 
of teachers, there is something decidedly wrong be- 
tween the relations of the results of public educa- 
tion and the time, money, and effort expended upon 
it. It is not only in America, but from every coun- 



268 A VALIANT WOMAN 

try in Europe, that a loud cry of disappointment 
and protest is arising; nor is it confined to the 
patrons and critics of the educational system, it 
arises from the teachers themselves. High school 
teachers complain that their pupils are not suffi- 
ciently prepared in the ward schools for the work 
required of them. Colleges and universities com- 
plain that the high schools send out their graduates 
in so raw a condition, mentally, that they are unable 
to do creditably the work assigned them there; and 
business men complain that the college graduate is 
too impractical for their purposes. Where does the 
fault lie? There is no one who works harder than 
the ward school teacher, or who is so nearly required 
to be a microcosm of learning as she. She must be 
artist, musician, scientist, litterateur, and teacher of 
gymnastics, all in one. The high school teacher is 
allowed the privilege of specialization, and brings to 
his work serious preparation and earnest enthusiasm, 
as well as the college professor. 

Then, what is the matter? Simply this: we have 
set out to do the impossible. We have believed that 
education is the universal panacea for all the ills of 
mankind, because ignorance is the source of them. 
We have believed that ignorance is always curable, 
and it is not. In the vast majority of cases, we may 
drive it back from the surface, as we drive back 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 269 

an ugly rash in the skin; but the disease is still in 
the blood and likely to break out anew in a more 
malignant form; or, to drop the metaphor, the abil- 
ity to take an education is much rarer than we have 
thought it to be, while the capacity for taking on a 
little surface culture is very general. The result is 
that our high schools and colleges are filled with 
3 r oung people of both sexes, whose minds, so far as 
learning goes, are in a state of complete stagnation, 
because they have reached the limit of their capac- 
ity for receiving an education. They have a good 
deal of superficial alertness, are still easily amused, 
and find abundant sources of amusement in their so- 
cial intercourse with each other and with those of 
their teachers who seem to them entertaining. They 
are mostly the students for whom athletics and so- 
cial functions exist — who go to high school and col- 
lege to have a good easy time at the expense of their 
parents, and are lonesome when they stay at home. 
If they think of an education at all, it is simply 
as a passport to society or as a guarantee against 
having to work with the hands. " Why do you go 
to college ? " I asked a dull boy who was desperately 
cramming for his examinations. " Because I'm look- 
ing for a snap when I graduate," was the frank re- 
ply. " I don't want to have to work my way up 
in life clerking around, or doing hard work on 



270 A VALIANT WOMAN 

a small salary. I've been thinking," he added 
naively, " that a college professor has about as easy 
a job as anybody, and he has social position, too. I'd 
like to go in for something like that." 

It is the attempt to make something worth while 
out of just such useless material as that, to carve 
seemly forms out of this cork, and never succeed- 
ing, of course, that has brought down upon us so 
much contempt and criticism as educators. The 
only way to regain esteem is to brave the storm of 
indignation which will follow this assertion, and 
sternly refuse to give the children's bread to those 
who are looking for nothing but cake. Let the 
schoolroom once more become a place for serious 
work; let the family provide for the social entertain- 
ment of its members. Let the teacher be a co-worker 
and guide to work, and cease the role of entertainer. 
The schoolrooms will be thinned; yes, but those who 
remain will have a chance to be really educated. 
Fewer teachers would be required. Yes, but those 
who were employed would receive better salaries and 
the profession of teaching would rise to a dignity 
it never will possess under existing circumstances. 
There is a pretty Oriental tale related by C. D. 
Warner in his Relation of Literature to Life, of a 
king who placed his son with an excellent preceptor 
with orders to educate him as he had educated his 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 271 

own sons, who were very clever and accomplished. 
After a year's teaching without any perceptible re- 
sult, the king bitterly reproached the tutor with hav- 
ing broken his promise and acting faithlessly. " O 
king," replied the tutor, " the education was the 
same, but the capacities are different. Although sil- 
ver and gold are produced from a stone, yet those 
metals are not to be found in every stone. The star 
Canopus shines all over the world, but the scented 
leather comes only from Yemen." Have we not 
been looking for gold in all our stones, and thinking 
that the scented leather can be found everywhere? 

Some eight or nine years ago, Professor Search 
called the attention of the educational world to the 
marked difference in mental capacity among the 
young, and suggested turning the recitation room 
into a study room in which each child in the pres- 
ence of his teacher should do only what he could do 
well without any attempt to keep to a required stand- 
ard for all. The plan was tried in many schools, but 
it was not found to work advantageously under all 
instructors. The absence of the incentive of keep- 
ing up to a required standard removed from naturally 
inert or easily distracted minds their desire to work, 
and they dawdled away their time. 

However, without resorting to the extreme of weed- 
ing out the parasitic students, instead of encour- 



272 A VALIANT WOMAN 

aging them as we do, an attempt might be made to 
weed out the curriculum. It could be considerably 
lightened by removing the weight of minute research 
and laboratory work which has followed the special- 
ization of the teacher's work; such specialization on 
the part of the pupil belongs to college and univer- 
sity work, and not to that of the high school, where 
it is an unwise as well as unnecessary burden to 
him. It stands to reason that as the teacher himself 
has found that his subject made heavy enough de- 
mands upon him to warrant his giving his entire time 
and attention to it, the pupil with his immature 
powers cannot be expected to throw himself entirely 
into the work of the three or four specialists under 
whom he is studying. Or if he must do so, let him 
limit himself to two subjects at the most at one time, 
that he may save himself the loss that inevitably 
follows the rapid cramming for a number of unre- 
lated subjects. The discouragement which follows 
the inability to grasp clearly the subject studied, is 
the most dangerous mood into which a young mind 
can fall. Nothing is so humiliating as the conscious- 
ness of impotence, and it may be that we owe the 
bitter pessimistic note of modern literature to this 
consciousness, as well as the restless seeking for an 
anodyne in frivolous pleasures and constant change 
of place. We wish the truth, but we are not vet 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 273 

strong enough to bear the weight of it without 
harm. 

We need also to be thoroughly convinced that no 
school training at all is infinitely preferable to that 
which kills in a young man his power of initiative, 
his courage in the face of difficulties, his will to work 
at whatever task falls to him ; and makes him willing 
to pass through life a parasite, receiving all, giving 
nothing in return, rather than face the tasks of an 
honest workman. In Das tagliche Brot, Clara Vie- 
big has given us a most realistic type of this parasite 
in Arthur Reschke, of whom his ignorant and am- 
bitious mother wished to make a professional man, in 
spite of his utter mental incapacity to take a higher 
education. It is our shame that we are turning out 
Arthur Reschkes every day instead of an army of 
honest laborers not ashamed to soil their hands and 
make them callous in honest work which they can 
do well. And it is our shame, also, that we are turn- 
ing out women who recoil from the homely duties of 
the fireside, and lust after the idleness and vain shows 
of the world or the vanities of public life. Blessed 
be the mothers, though they construe not Latin or 
Greek, in whom the true spirit of motherhood lives 
and who bequeath it intact to their daughters ! 

Another deplorable source of weakness in our 
school work is the exhausting system of examinations, 



274 A VALIANT WOMAN 

which increase the burden of teacher and pupil with- 
out any compensation for the exhaustion. Every 
alert teacher knows perfectly well what his pupils 
know in the subject he is teaching them; and he 
knows, too, that the examination is not a test of real 
ability^, but of the parrot-like power of the memory 
and of physical endurance. In Le Culte de V Incom- 
petence Faguet says : 

" In our country, examinations are all founded 
upon a misinterpretation ; I mean upon the confusion 
between knowledge and competency. Competency is 
what is very conscientiously sought for, and it is 
thought to be found in knowledge. The examination 
demands that the candidate shall know something, 
and the contest demands that he shall know more than 
others. Hence one of the most painful sores of our 
civilization. 

" The preparation for examinations is an ingurgi- 
tation, a heaping up, a cramming which has for its 
first effect to render even a gifted man entirely pas- 
sive at the age when his intellectual activity is the 
keenest. Then, as an effect of overwork during five, 
eight, or ten years of his youth, he is disgusted with 
intellectual work and rendered impotent in it for the 
rest of his life. 

" I am persuaded, if I may be allowed to support 
my argument by an example well known to me, that 



METHODS AND THEIR MAKERS 275 

if I have worked a little from twenty-five to sixty- 
three, it is because I have never but half succeeded 
in an examination or a contest. Very inquisitive 
about many things, I was interested in the * subjects 
of the program,' but also in other subjects and the 
program was neglected. I was received. I was 
oftener refused. In short, I reached my twenty-sixth 
year behind my contemporaries but not overworked, 
not exhausted, and not at all disgusted with intellec- 
tual work. I know that some of my comrades who 
never missed an examination, but who passed them 
all very brilliantly, have worked as hard as I to the 
sixtieth year, but they are extremely rare." 



CHAPTER VII 

THE VALIANT WOMAN 

T CONFESS that I begin this last chapter of my 
book with many misgivings. I have wandered 
far away from the rare woman who is its excuse for 
being, and when I return to her, and try to recall 
her in all the beauty and simplicity of her character, 
I feel how insufficient are any words of mine to paint 
her as she was to me, and to all who knew her and 
can never forget her. 

It was my great misfortune to lose sight of her 
for a number of years, and when we met again, she 
was no longer teaching in the public schools. A 
slight deafness had come upon her, destined, alas ! 
to increase with the years, and she had reluctantly 
accepted this affliction as an intimation that her work 
in the schoolroom was over. Many years later she 
wrote : " I have felt the folding of my hands all too 
soon in life, as if I had left the field crippled when 
the sun was not yet low enough." 

But in reality she had never left the field, never 
folded her hands. She was no skulker, no deserter. 
Her courage never failed. She did not look back- 

276 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 277 

ward but ever forward, and each morning was a 
fresh invitation to live anew. She was born to teach, 
if only by her presence, and she taught till her lips 
were silenced forever. Her family was the human 
race. Wherever she met a child, there was her school- 
room. Wherever she met a young mind eagerly 
groping its way into light, there she stood with her 
hand outstretched. She shared the books she read. 
She talked on the great vital questions, — the conduct 
of life, the sources of happiness, the relation of man 
to man, the great perhaps; but it was never a forced 
talk, it arose quite naturally, and it was never vul- 
garized by the personalities of idle gossip. " I put 
into circulation as little personal matter as possible," 
she said once, and she spoke truly. 

She brought to her high themes a calm judgment, 
a ripe experience, and a flexibility in discussion that 
indicated a mind continually in search of truth and 
not to be repelled by any form in which it might 
present itself. Over the great unsolvable problems 
she troubled herself little, having humanity and the 
myriad forms of nature to love and to study, and 
feeling the limitations of the human mind facing the 
illimitable. To open wider and ever wider the win- 
dows of the soul to the beauty of earth and sky, to 
absorb more and more of human experiences that the 
eye may look more compassionately on human frail- 



278 A VALIANT WOMAN 

ties, the heart throb more in unison with the heart 
of all, — that was what life meant to her. She did 
not measure its value by immortality, but by its 
power of actual growth, no matter within what nar- 
row limits of time that growth might be confined. 
She did not ask that growth should imply increase 
of pleasures, but increase of light, increase of vision, 
increase of sympathetic helpfulness; and she knew 
that this increase of power must often be bought by 
pain and travail of spirit. But she also knew, no 
one better, that it is not given to every soul to ac- 
cept life as it is, so humbly, so gratefully; that 
the great mass of mankind need other faiths, other 
lures, to find life sweet or worth the living, and she 
would not willingly have deprived any halting soul 
of its crutch. She only asked that since she herself 
could walk upright without it, it should not forcibly 
be thrust upon her. To all the subtle forms of find- 
ing life a wretched farce and making one's self mis- 
erable over it, she was an utter stranger. The dawn 
always found her facing the light with the joyous 
freshness of a child. No gloomy or despairing 
thought ever passed her lips or flowed from her pen ; 
yet she did not miss sharing the common sorrows of 
humanity, but she knew how to burn her own smoke, 
and carried about with her no sooty, stifling atmos- 
phere. Perhaps she owed the poise and serenity 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 279 

which she had to the purity of her life and the health 
of her nature. 

" I am fortunate," she writes, " in not having by 
nature a vein of melancholy. I have had little bits 
of depression, but only rarely. For such I am thank- 
ful, otherwise I should have lacked an experience 
which every one ought to have. I am not naturally 
nervous, but have had touches of nervousness, and 
am glad. Now, I can sympathize with nervous peo- 
ple as well as with those who are subject to depres- 
sion. Indifference or sharp rebuke in any form I 
find never penetrates me. I easily shake it off; but 
a touch of tenderness enters my heart. My niece is 
so loving and gentle, so genuine in every expression 
of affection, that she often moves me. Yesterday, as 
I left, she buttoned my coat, tied my bonnet, told 
me I looked pretty in my new coat and hat; and on 
the steps she put her arms around me so that I 
found the tears starting to my eyes; but I was just 
going, and she did not perceive it. She might have 
thought me unhappy had she done so. . . . Bitter 
experiences teach us to pass lightly over little annoy- 
ances. So, perhaps, they are not so hurtful in the 
end; for little causes of vexation are coming con- 
stantly to those who notice trifles, or allow them to 
be disturbing. Perhaps the whole secret of happi- 
ness is this : when we cease to resist, we cease to suf- 



280 A VALIANT WOMAN 

fer. Then, we must not be slaves to others, and 
give them the power to wound us or fret us. I have 
gained much in peace of mind since I have learned 
the lesson of quietly accepting what I am powerless 
to change in the past or present, feeling in some 
way that I cannot see, that it was best for me, and 
that so very soon our life will be rolled up like a 
scroll, and all our little sufferings here that we mag- 
nify because we are so short-sighted will seem as noth- 
ing, if our soul after death begins another existence. 
But if soul and body die together, why should we 
fear a perfect rest in everlasting sleep? We usually 
leave the world like tired children needing sleep. . . . 
" Do not expect that the day will ever come when 
you will have no cross to carry. Never be impatient 
to get rid of one trouble, for a greater one is wait- 
ing to take the vacant place. Goethe says somewhere 
that happiness must be cultivated like a plant. I do 
believe we all lose much by not fully appreciating 
our present blessings. I do not know how it may be 
with you, but this has been my experience, — at any 
period of my life to look back and wonder how I 
could have considered things worth an hour's worry 
which should have been entirely eclipsed by some ac- 
companying blessing. Think how much our youth 
is, or ought to be to us ; good teeth, good eyes, fresh, 
unwrinkled faces, life in every limb! I think now, 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 281 

how was it possible that I did not fully appreciate 
the sweet companionship of my sister when she was 
here on earth. She is gone! . . . Grateful am I to 
you, for your firm resolve to keep ever before you 
your present blessings, never looking back with re- 
gret, or looking forward to a time when there will 
be no bitter to balance the sweet. Emerson, my 
priest and prophet, says : ■ Some favorable event 
raises your spirits, and you think good days are pre- 
paring for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can 
bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring 
you peace but the triumph of principles.' As long 
as sight and hearing remain with you, and you are 
not in terrible physical pain, and your two feet will 
carry you about, remember your promise, and sing 
in your heart : c What shall I render to my God for 
all His gifts to me? ' 

" When my deafness presents itself to me as a 
great affliction, I drive away the apparition by the 
thought that I would not change deafness for a 
chronic disease that brought me constant pain. Yet 
my exceeding deafness has narrowed my life to a 
point. I feel what a prison it is, shutting me out 
from my kind, and were I rich, I would be blind 
rather than deaf. One of the best aurists, here, 
praises my bravery. He does not say as so many 
do : ' You have your eyes. You have this compen- 



282 A VALIANT WOMAN 

sation, that you do not hear many foolish things.^ 
No such nonsense ! but he says : ' I sometimes won- 
der how I could bear your deafness ! ' When he 
praises my courage, I am like a child. I feel that 
I must deserve the praise by having the courage which 
he says I have, or I shall be wearing something not 
belonging to me. I told him one day that, as some 
one said of praise received, 6 1 do not deserve your 
praise, but I love you the more for your will to 
praise.' One prefers to be seen through a warm, 
rich heart, even if it throws its own colors on the 
objects viewed, than to be seen by one incapable of 
an enduring love except for himself. 

" Whewell contended that loss of vision was pref- 
erable to loss of hearing, because it shut one out 
less from human companionship, and even Lowell said 
that if he had to give up people or books, he would 
give up books." 

She, too, our valiant woman, would have given up 
books, priceless as was their companionship to her, 
rather than the close, living contact of the human 
heart, loving to feel it beat against her own, loving 
to share the riches of her own rich nature with those 
who were poorer in spirit, and doing it with no suave 
condescension, no real consciousness of her superior- 
ity, but with a sense of richness received from them. 
This was the reason that deafness was an unusually 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 283 

cruel hardship to her ; but she bore it with noble forti- 
tude, rarely speaking of it, and more solicitous 
about sparing others the fatigue of talking loud than 
herself the burden of trying to hear. 

Yet, even this great barrier did not prevent her 
from drawing confidences, even from the most re- 
served. " I don't know why I tell you this. I have 
never in my life spoken of it before," was the con- 
fession she repeatedly heard. " I was not the one to 
be deaf," she wrote sadly, alluding once to this fact 
in her relation to others. Nor was she. She made 
friends among all classes of people, rich and poor, 
high and low, and was grateful for every new life that 
came into her own to broaden its outlook and enlarge 
its sympathy. It was her destiny to have no settled 
home, to live in many states, and almost always 
among strangers, so that there came to her early a 
vivid sense of human kinship. " I feel so near to 
the heart of the people," she says, writing from New 
Mexico, " that when I take my walks abroad I feel 
like speaking to every one whose appearance be- 
speaks a life of hardship. There is an old Mexican 
woman poorly clad with whom I always exchange 
a greeting, although we do not express ourselves in 
the same language. Her face always lights up as 
when old friends meet. What a puzzle it is to me, 
that in this short, mysterious life of ours, coming 



284 A VALIANT WOMAN 

from we know not where, going at its close we know 
not where, with everything to make us humble and 
gentle, so many of us should be purse or station 
proud! My idea of generosity does not consist in 
the giving of material things, but in bestowing very 
freely the best spiritual gifts that the heart ever has, 
love, kindness, real sympathy for trials, human inter- 
ests, and the like." 

How freely she gave of her own warm heart, only 
she herself knew; for although no one was in reality 
ever more individual than she, no one was ever more 
genuinely impersonal, more fluid, more ready to sink 
herself out of sight and live sympathetically in the 
experience of others. And there came with this 
power an enlarged vision, an exquisitely fine toler- 
ance, a feeling of universal kinship, that made her 
the first one to whom we wished to go with something 
beautiful or noble to show her, or to tell her of it, 
sure of her enthusiasm and appreciation, — or with 
something sorrowful to relate, sure of her profound 
sympathy, — so large was her nature, so exquisitely 
attuned to every chord of human joy or human woe. 
The children of her friends, or the children of the 
families among whom she boarded, were the objects 
of her unwearying, loving care. She kept herself 
informed of their school work, helped them and en- 
couraged them in their studies, taught them fine 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 285 

poems, gave them books, guided their reading, and in- 
cited them in various ways to study and to learn. 

I recall one summer afternoon in one of the Pa- 
cific coast towns, as we were walking down the street 
together, she suddenly stopped and beckoned to a 
small boy of eight or nine who was trundling his hoop 
at some distance from us. When he came up, he 
lifted his cap, smiling brightly, and she introduced 
him to me as her landlady's son, and asked him to 
recite for me the last poem which he had learned. 
The boy immediately recited The Chambered Nau- 
tilus, and as the childish voice repeated the noble 
lines, 

" Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 
As the swift seasons roll ! " 

there flashed over me again, as so often before, a 
glad and grateful consciousness of the beautiful un- 
selfishness of this noble woman, her immense patience, 
the light she radiated everywhere, the good she did 
so simply, so effectually, passing on the world's great 
treasures of thought and feeling from child to child, 
instead of hiving its wisdom for herself alone. 

" I love the boy ! " she exclaimed when we were 
alone again. " He looks so beautiful to me as he re- 
cites his poems. We are sort of chums. We are 
just starting on our twenty-eighth poem. The other 



286 A VALIANT WOMAN 

day, he was starting on a new term with a new 
teacher and was to get his new books, so he said to 
me : ' I won't be able to have any poem to-morrow.' 
I replied, ' Though the sky fall, we must have our 
poetry ! ' He smiled acquiescence. But I thought 
his new poem should be easy, so I selected, We are 
Seven. I don't give him more lines than he can learn 
in five or six minutes, then we go over an old one. 
He learns each new poem more easily, and it is won- 
derful to me how he remembers those learned, but 
then I never let him forget any. His teacher tries 
to have all her pupils read with expression, and she 
has hurt his reading. It was natural, before, even 
if a little monotonous. Now he has to elocutionize, 
and his reciting is simply ridiculous. I tell him not 
to do so, that the simplest way he recites a poem is 
the best, but I don't make much fuss ; for it is the 
learning of the poems that I want, and I can't change 
the wrong the teacher is doing. Last New Year's 
day, he recited as his gift to me, Carlyle's Dawning 
Day." 

It was not only to the young that she was an in- 
spiration, she was especially helpful to women of 
the middle and poorer class. She freed them from 
the tyranny of " they say," the tyranny of count- 
less unnecessary forms of household drudgery, and 
the tyranny of dress. Paying as little regard to her 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 287 

own dress and spending as little upon it as possible, 
yet always spotlessly neat and clean, she could teach 
by example, as well as precept, the folly of wast- 
ing time and money in aping changing fashions. 
She often expressed her wonder if the day would 
ever come when mothers would cease to spend their 
time making fine underclothes and elaborate outside 
ones for themselves and their children, wearing out 
their eyes over work which leaves no value behind,, 
instead of dressing their little ones simply and inex- 
pensively, placing the mind and its development 
above finery for the body, and taking infinite pains 
to find out from cultured scholars the best course of 
reading for their children, and then reading to them 
classical works over and over, rather than allowing 
them to read a quantity of trash. 

" I am alwaj^s thankful," she says, " that I was 
a farmer's daughter, one of many children, and when 
growing up, could only have simple dresses and only 
what I needed. I am glad, too, that I never after- 
wards developed a love of fine and costly dressing, 
for it would have taken all my income and made me 
a very selfish woman. So, you see, that though I 
have my legacy of misfortune in my extreme deaf- 
ness, I have had great blessings of which I am con- 
scious. I have a hatred of show and shams, a fool- 
ish craving for affection, and a deep regret for loss 



288 A VALIANT WOMAN 

of time in my young days. There was so little read- 
ing done, almost none by those who went to public 
school. The teachers were illiterate, as are so many 
teachers now. But I learned the beauty of simplic- 
ity through one rare woman of high culture who has 
been hanging in a conspicuous place on the walls of 
my memory ever since. Was not that wonderful 
woman a teacher of all who saw her as she walked 
about town? There have been many other gifted 
and noble women who set the fashion of plain dress- 
ing, as she did. Was not Lydia Maria Child one of 
those women? I have always greatly admired her 
character, and wish that we had had many such 
among us." 

Just as she deplored the waste of time on dress, 
so she deplored the minute attention given to house- 
keeping at the expense of time and health. The 
ironing of sheets, towels, and underwear she thought 
not only a stupid waste of time, but a real loss under 
the iron of the sweet freshness which the air gives to 
them, as they hang out-of-doors. " I have no re- 
spect for faultless housekeeping," she declared. " I 
see it too often preferred to training children rightly 
and reading to them early. Polishing the mind is 
better than polishing the furniture. It is easy to 
keep things in place and so have the house orderly. 
I don't like a disorderly house, but better a little 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 289 

dust on floors and furniture than on the mind. Bet- 
ter make a girl's underclothing of coarse unbleached 
cotton, with the fewest stitches and no trimming, and 
have time for reading to her, beginning before the 
alphabet is learned." 

However, in spite of this seeming severity of 
taste, she was, as she herself said, an extravagant ad- 
mirer of beautiful things in nature and art. " I can 
hardly see a thing of rare beauty in a store, within 
my power to buy, that I can leave unpurchased, al- 
though I give it away to gratify my love of giving, 
to any one I love. A room with a fine prospect of 
sky, mountain, and water charms me more than the 
most elegant furniture. I enjoy seeing a woman 
finely dressed, if her dress, as Spencer says, is sim- 
ple without effort; and on the other hand, a dress, 
as he expresses it, tawdry, discordant in colors, bad 
from over-decoration, offends my eye. I enjoy color 
in natural objects. I dislike bright colors in dress. 
I do dislike cheap bric-a-brac, cheap pictures and 
crowded rooms, pillow-shams, sofa pillows, piles of 
them, and now, these short sleeves tied with ribbons 
or bows, — and needless ribbons on children's hair. 

" A friend took me through her house the other 
day, and I felt at home in it. I thought it had never 
before impressed me as being so simple and attrac- 
tive. I praised it, which I do not remember having 



290 A VALIANT WOMAN 

done before. Afterward she said to me : ' How 
do you like the way the furniture is covered? ' 
There was the secret of the change! The old worn, 
stuffed coverings of sofa and chairs had been taken 
off, and a covering like leather had been substituted. 
The old woolen carpets were removed, and a pretty, 
little-figured straw matting was on the floor, through 
which the dust could not go. I had not understood 
why the little house impressed me as it had not done 
before, until my friend asked me how I liked the 
change. A crowded room is not restful to me, nor 
a room set apart for especial occasions. I like that 
line from the Talmud, i Use your best vase to-day. 
for to-morrow it may be broken.' I am old enough 
to remember the shut-up parlor in country places, 
only opened on rare occasions. What dull places 
they were ! " 

I should do this admirable woman a great injus- 
tice if, in laying stress upon her calm, beautiful 
seriousness, I should neglect to speak of her quick 
sense of humor, of the ready, ringing laugh which 
always accompanied her perception of real fun. 
" What I miss with people in daily life," she writes, 
" is a little humor. How it rests one ! How shallow 
is one who is all gayety! how dull one who is all 
seriousness ! " It was her quick sense of humor that 
made her so delightful a companion, and saved her 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 291 

from the obsession of fixed ideas and that painful 
weight of gravity which often accompany learning. 
" Nothing," says Scott, " is so tiresome as walking 
through some beautiful scene with a minute philos- 
opher, a botanist or pebble gatherer, who is eternally 
calling you from the grand features of the natural 
scenery to look at grasses and chucky stones ! " 

Nor is there anything more tiresome than the 
naturally slow and stupid, and naturally sentimental 
woman who vaguely perceives that there is an aris- 
tocracy of intellect really worth while, but who does 
not know that one must be born into it and cannot 
marry into it or study one's self into it; and whose 
one object in life is therefore to " learn something," 
whose praise of anything beautiful or fine always 
concludes with, " It is so instructive ! " This woman 
is absolutely incapable of judgments and admira- 
tions at first hand, but is wholly dependent upon 
lectures, guide books, and clubs for her ideas and 
her course of reading. Our valiant woman never be- 
longed to a club or any kind of a " society " in her life. 
She valued her freedom too highly, and needed no 
guide to the best. She had no sympathy with the 
strenuous imitators of the intellectual life, for she 
saw that vanity and not real love of learning is 
the incentive to their effort. Far above all these 
external trappings of learning, she counted the edu- 



2Q2 A VALIANT WOMAN 

cation of heart and hand, the swift sympathy, the 
natural kindness, the deft and busy fingers that cre- 
ate order and cleanliness around them. Uncomplain- 
ing and with infinite patience, she took upon herself 
some lowly task neglected by those of whom she 
rented her room, sweeping and scrubbing the dirty 
stairs, washing everybody's dirty dishes in the kitchen 
used by several women in common, and keeping it 
sweet and clean. "It is good for me. I need the 
exercise. I really don't mind it." These were her 
constant replies to those who knew that she was do- 
ing the work of shirkers. But there was that in 
her character that did not lend itself to imposition. 
Even the shirkers knew that, and never took her 
services as their right. They felt and acknowledged 
her superiority, her shrinking from what is base and 
common, her utter refusal to take any part in the ma- 
licious tattle of gossip-lovers. " I am extremely 
democratic," she once said of herself, " but with all 
that, I have another fiber in my nature. In a way, 
I like to keep a certain aloofness from the many. 
How I hate to become common by a too close touch 
with the multitude! How few compared with the 
great majority are true, clear-headed, truthful, sim- 
ple, kind, unselfish, and not gossiping. I have never 
been inclined to take prejudices, but when I find a 
woman untruthful, false, malicious, I want a high 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 293 

wall between her and me. Women who are not read- 
ers are apt to make people and their affairs the sub- 
ject of conversation. Had I my own little house, 
there are fewer and fewer I should like to take into 
it as companions. Some, not readers, think over and 
over little things one says, that should pass away 
with the hour in which they were said, and would do 
so, if fresh thoughts were continually coming into the 
mind from fine books ; and so with them there is not 
the freedom of long talk." 

Mingling, then, with all sorts of common people, 
yet not of them, but in no way separating herself 
from them, except by not sharing their sordidness 
of thought, she won their love and respect, and gave 
them a sweet, indulgent affection in return. Abso- 
lutely without personal vanity, she was nobly proud 
in her own peculiar way. She could not too quickly 
or too freely share all her pleasures, but her suffer- 
ings she kept to herself. During the last years of 
her life, she had severe and frequent attacks of 
angina pectoris, and often could not walk a block 
without painful constriction of chest and arm. One 
day, she had ten such excruciating attacks; but no 
one except her physician and one trusted friend 
knew anything about it, and when she was congratu- 
lated on an appearance of health, she only answered 
with a quiet smile that was interpreted as a sign of 



294 A VALIANT WOMAN 

acquiescence. Yet she knew that hers was only a 
case of physical endurance, and she grew familiar 
with the face of death in those hours of awful strug- 
gle. When illness came upon her, she went quietly 
to some hospital where she could have good care, 
and on her recovery might mention it or not, as 
occasion arose to comment upon some new phase of 
her life. " Our heaviest burdens must rest on our 
own shoulders," she said; and her burdens never 
rested elsewhere. " I miss much that I had in the 
hospital," she wrote of one such experience, — -" the 
human sunshine in the smiles of the young women 
nurses, the young mothers who have borne little ones. 
— although they usually leave two weeks after the 
great event which they came to the hospital to await." 
And again she writes: "The dear Catholic sisters! 
I love them ! I would say naught against Catholi- 
cism. In fact, I like it better than the hard creeds 
of many Protestants ; some of the hardest, most evil- 
minded women I have ever met were of the latter faith, 
rejoicing that they had been converted, and so saved 
from future damnation." 

This remarkable reticence in private suffering had 
the natural result of creating about her a fictitious at- 
mosphere of invulnerability. She seemed set apart 
from human weaknesses in an atmosphere of per- 
petual calm. It was impossible to think of her as 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 295 

growing old, as poor, isolated, or lonely in any way. 
She seemed the one woman of infinite resources, large 
leisure, and deep, calm happiness. The secret of it 
all was that she had found what Renan calls " V in- 
effable joie du renohcement a la joie " (the ineffable 
joy of the renunciation of joy). 

With a very small income, she contrived to be not 
only never in debt, but to be the most generous of 
generous women. She had a passion for giving, and 
a passionate reluctance to receive, and she indulged 
her passion most freely to those whom she loved, but 
made it impossible for them to give her anything. 
Her wants were reduced to such a nakedness of abso- 
lute necessities, that every gift to her was a super- 
fluity which she gladly and quickly passed on to some 
one to whom it seemed a necessity or was the source 
of pleasure. Apropos of gifts, she writes: 

" I must confess a weakness that you not long ago 
acknowledged. When an acquaintance, one not my 
superior, gives me anything, I want to make some 
return. This is wrong. It is ill-treating the giver, 
showing a certain disrespect, as if I should say: 
c You have no right to give me anything. I must give 
back your gift in some form.' Lafcadio Hearn says 
in one of his books : ' I remember having once been 
severely chided by a hoary friend of mine, a white- 
bearded Mentor, because I had received a present 



296 A VALIANT WOMAN 

from a friend, and had impulsively exclaimed : " Do 
tell me what I shall give him in return." " Give him 
in return?" quoth Mentor. "What for? To de- 
stroy your little obligation of gratitude? to insult 
your friend by practically intimating that you be- 
lieve he expected something in return? Don't send 
him anything save thanks." ' 

" I have little of the sentiment that many women 
have. To some, a gift is as sacred as the heart of 
a friend. To me it is only the expression of a wish 
to give a little pleasure. The merit of this is the 
giving and receiving. It is purely immaterial, so 
it cannot be given to another, although the gift can. 
The gift of love is the gift I prize. Material ones 
have positively no value in comparison. So I often 
give the latter away, as you know. But how my 
heart would feel the loss of the former, which I never 
would part with at any price ! " 

There was one form of giving, however, which she 
rarely practiced and which she heartily disliked, 
and that was Christmas giving. She recognized in 
it a mere custom, a forced, spasmodic generosity, a 
conventionality in which the heart has little or no 
part ; nay, more, a custom which has become a heavy 
and hateful tax upon many people, compelling them 
to useless extravagances which they bitterly regret 
but are too weak to renounce; and with her perfect 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 297 

courage on its background of boundless generosity, 
she could say: 

" What a mad frenzy there is at Christmas time ! 
These days are as quiet to me as if there were no 
Christmas. I may give to some who cannot return 
the gift, but I never exchange presents" I have 
italicized the last four words, for the quiet sentence 
with its delightful irony deserves emphasis. It sums 
up in a nutshell the character of an immense part of 
the spirit of Christmas giving. 

Nor was she inclined to look much more favorably 
on the gastronomic parade of Thanksgiving day. 
" It is Thanksgiving," she writes. " I don't care 
a straw for the conventional dinner that is thought to 
belong to the day. The masses seem, then, to con- 
sider the belly a god to whom they must bring offer- 
ings. I turn away from all this. A postcard came 
this morning with a big turkey filling one side, with 
two gayly dressed, very happy-looking children in 
a little cart hitched to it, and above — ' Good wishes 
for Thanksgiving. 9 The children are the drivers. 
Yes, that is Thanksgiving to most of us. I think 
it cruel to have women sitting on the street begging 
money for a big charity dinner for the poor, placing 
in the memory for life the experience of eating as 
a mendicant child at such a table. Had I ever had 
such an experience in my childhood, I would give 



298 A VALIANT WOMAN 

one of my fingers could I have it erased; but I never 
would have regretted eating a crust of bread for a 
dinner on that day, if my parents could have afforded 
no better a dinner. 

" Were I a mother of children to-day, I would try 
to give them the love of fine books early, and of 
choice things ; then I would let them take their choice 
when they were old enough to hear of a special din- 
ner on Thanksgiving day, between having such a 
dinner or having some fine picture, or book, or curio, 
or an outing to some interesting place not far off. 
I should feel that I had been lacking in my train- 
ing of them, if they said, ' Let us have the dinner.' 
I always have my plainest dinner on this day and on 
Christmas." 

This habit was not the effect of a narrow asceti- 
cism, but was simply a sincere protest against the 
assumption that extravagance, dissipation, or envy 
represent the spirit of gratitude and reverence. It 
was real life driven into a corner looking out on a 
noisy masquerade, and calmly deciding that the play 
was immeasurably inferior to the real thing. For 
this brave woman had stripped life to the bone and 
found it sweetest there; sweetest in its absolute in- 
dependence of artifice and make-believe, sweetest in 
its wholesome bareness, its dependence only on sun, 
and air, and soil, and loving human intercourse ; and 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 299 

the beautiful simplicity of her life, making no de- 
mands on others, while rendering them the noblest 
service, was in accordance with the highest ethical 
teaching that we have. 

As I have said before, she troubled herself not at 
all over the unknown, but was content to live one lif e 
at a time. Without subscribing to any dogma or 
any creed, or associating herself with any sect, she 
was yet so interpenetrated with the most beautiful 
truths of Christianity, that the exquisite purity and 
renunciation of her life, its ever increasing helpful- 
ness in acts of kindness and love, put to shame that 
of any professing Christian I have ever known. Life 
withers in many hearts the power to love, and thus 
often ages men and women in their prime; but her 
heart never grew old, never lost its power of deep 
and tender feeling, and so she herself seemed never 
to age. Her hair whitened, a few lines came into 
the sweet, grave face; the slender figure lost some- 
thing of its roundness, but old age never bent it ; she 
still walked erect and with an elastic step to the end. 
And the beautiful, bright, vivacious intellect kept its 
vigor to the last. Writing only a month before her 
death, in her seventy-seventh year, she says: 

" I, too, was penetrated by the sunshine and the 
tranquillity of the outer world, and felt happy, very 
happy. I had a renewal of energy, and as I passed 



300 A VALIANT WOMAN 

along to the post office, and then to a restaurant, I 
was unconscious of walking." 

Yet she knew perfectly well that she had entered 
the shadow of the great unknown, but it neither 
chilled nor frightened her. She disposed of a few 
things still in her possession, closed her account with 
life, and calmly waited for the end. 

" I have no sentiment about the ashes of the hu- 
man body. I have the feeling that the funeral of 
most persons should be very private, and especially 
so if one is not among kin, like myself. I early 
imbibed an aversion for public funerals. When I 
was young, so many attended such, whether there was 
any real friendship for the departed or not. How 
man}' times I have seen those attending try to get 
a position where they could see the mourners as they 
passed out of the house, and often heard remarks as 
to how the different ones felt. They did not real- 
ize that a grief can be too deep for tears. I wish 
my body after death to go to the undertaker's, none 
seeing it there; then it is to be cremated and the 
ashes to be put in some unmarked place to mingle 
directly with the soil, so that there can never be any 
removal, and never any gravestone. I have no more 
sentiment about my body than I should have about 
any garment I had worn, when burned to ashes be- 
cause it was worn out." 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 



301 



She often expressed her dislike of monuments in 
graveyards, nor would she have the public be in a 
hurry to commemorate any man or woman in this 
way until time had tested whether what they had 
done to humanity were of any value or not. " I be- 
lieve no public monument should be erected to any 
one until the man or woman has been dead fifty years. 
. . . Better to place the ashes of the dead on moun- 
tains which are accessible, and let the rains bear them 
down over their sides to be raised aloft by nature into 
blossoms and trees." Her wishes were respected. 
She died on the 4th of February, 1910, and her body 
was cremated. 

Her sister wrote of her : " Content to live in the 
greatest simplicity herself, she could help a young 
woman through a university without wishing the re- 
cipient of her bounty to feel hampered. Surely her 
touch for money was one of rare delicacy, and the 
ring of gold and silver made beautiful music in its 
passage through her hands. Her manner of spend- 
ing it was so fine. Then, too, there was a certain 
breadth of mind, which came perhaps from her 
extraordinary rectitude. There could have been 
very little change for her, as she passed on. She 
simply left the mortal tent." 

This is not merely a beautiful expression of sis- 
terly affection ; it is the heartfelt sentiment of all 



302 A VALIANT WOMAN 

who knew her. She seemed exempt from the weak- 
nesses of her sex, without in the slightest degree los- 
ing the charm of perfect womanliness. She had 
remarkable good sense, combined with a quick imagi- 
nation and a keen appreciation of humor. She was 
capable of strong, tenacious attachments without 
silly sentimentality. " Passionate love quickly fades 
away," she remarked, " but friendship dies a hard 
death. Distance of time and space does not kill it. 
I do believe that marriage between a congenial pair 
is the ideal life ; still, I would give my life as a teacher 
in preference to the wedded life." Men were strongly 
attracted to her, not only because of her rare good 
sense and tranquil cheerfulness, but because of the 
rare, subtle motherliness that enveloped her like a 
warm atmosphere. She, too, enjoyed her friendships 
with them, finding, on the whole, that they made 
more satisfactory comrades than women, and always 
maintained that, as a rule, they were franker, more 
genuinely tender, truer and more intellectual. As 
for herself, the large impersonal attitude that was 
hers, her calm acceptance of life's chagrins, the 
sweet graciousness with which she gave herself to all 
who were in the least degree worthy to know her, the 
magnetic effect of her goodness and her sincerity, 
made her an incomparable friend and companion. 
She fitted herself to you, as the glove to the hand. 



THE VALIANT WOMAN 303 

She had lived among so many different people in so 
many different places and had become so singularly 
flexible and so beautifully broad and tolerant, that 
you could not shock her in any way, but could bare 
your soul's nakedness to her, and be not ashamed. 

If the perfection of life be, as the greatest ethi- 
cal teacher of our age, Leo Tolstoi', says, " the in- 
crease of love in the heart," then she came as near 
to that perfection as it is permitted us to come. She 
was a rare, heroic soul who gave much to others, and 
expected nothing in return, who never flinched on 
life's battle-field, nor paraded her wounds, nor bore 
defeat with less calm than if it had been victory, nor 
shirked a duty, nor omitted a kindness, and dying 
left to all who knew her a void in the heart which can 
never be filled. 



OCT 24 1912 



